June 12, 2008

Several weeks ago, I posted a message by a commenter named Rec1Man, who has been doing a lot of work to come up with a model of India's potential average IQ. This is one of the most important questions for predicting the course of the 21st Century.

The first edition of Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations reported four studies from India from 1959-1986, with averages varying only across a rather narrow range of 78-82.

On the other hand, as I've pointed out since 2002, India is the most complicated country in the world, so it's hard to get a nationally representative sample.

Further, the higher IQs registered by Indians in their diaspora, like the higher IQs recorded by African Americans and West Indians compared to Africans, suggests that better nutrition, health, education, and so forth could raise the relative standing of Indians. After all, they've been plagued by extreme poverty, which is starting to abate. For example, India is particularly beset by lack of iodine in the diet, which is a relatively easy IQ-lowering problem to deal with.

Rec1Man's goal has been to come up with a model that's simple enough to comprehend. Lots of critics in the comments responded that his eight part categorization of Indian demographics was too simple. As Einstein said, Science should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Still, we need somewhere to start, so Rec1Man's model, after being refined over the last few weeks, seems like a decent starting point.

Here is my attempt at a summary of rec1man's analyses. Edit as required.

This eight-segment breakdown of the Indian population provides a more accurate picture of the human resource potential of the Indian population, compared to simplistic unimodal population model with mean IQ of 85 and SD =15.

The Indian population can be grouped in terms of the four traditional caste super-categories :

Note: The usage of the 4 caste supercategories is not literal. For the purposes of estimating national average IQ, Syrian Christians or Parsees would be lumped in with the Brahmins, and the few peasant castes with a literate tradition would be moved up to the merchant class.

The "Brahmin" and "Merchants" have had multiple generations of a literate tradition and also engaged in professions that required greater cognitive ability (memorization, calculation), compared to the "Peasants" (who formed the ranks of the warrior class and had/have the most political power) and Dalits (who also have the least amount of central-west asian-european admixture and have been engaged in menial tasks on the fringes of society). [As in the Cochran-Harpending model of the evolution of high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs, under Malthusian pressure, these occupational slots are theorized to have selected for higher IQs. -- Steve]

This model posits an IQ penalty for North Indian groups as a result of Islamic invasions/genocide of north Indian elites over a millennium.

Improvement in living conditions, nutrition, and access to education is expected to increase mean IQ by 7.5 points by the end of this century, relative to the Anglo-American average. India has the human resource potential to be to be a developed society with advanced technological capabilities by the end of this century. The cognitive elites of India will primarily come from the Brahmin and Merchant super-categories and numerically compare favorably with the other Asian superpower China.

I certainly can't comment on the validity of the empirical details that underlie this model -- India being so complicated -- but the general approach seems not unreasonable to me. The point is to put a framework out there for the public to consider.

One potential problem that jumps out at me with Rec1Man's approach, though, is the potential for disparate fertility interfering with improving environmental conditions. Are fertility rates the same across all groups, or are lower IQ groups growing faster? The Bombay Parsis, who were the most affluent and educated group in India for much of the 20th century, are said to be imploding demographically. If IQ, education, and declining fertility are correlated, then dysgenic / dyscultural effects could undermine some of the gains from an improved environment.

Granted, we haven't seen much hard evidence of a dysgenic / dyscultural relative effect yet. But, then, we haven't seen much hard evidence of a positive Flynn relative effect. We've seen lots of evidence of an absolute Flynn effect, but little evidence of countries shifting relative average IQs, as I documented here. We've probably seen more evidence of relative changes in height than relative changes in IQ.

247 comments:

I teach students from all over the world, including from this group, and I have to say that this figure (being eg 5 points higher than New York Ashkenazi) seems extremely unlikely and considerably too high. All the high end current figures look around 10 points too high to me.

Sorry, I find this a little disappointing. All the caste percentages are the same for North and South ... all he did is divide each caste into 80% North and 20% South. And except for the Dalits, each caste has exactly a 5-point IQ difference between North and South. So basically, the four main castes don't take into account any possible variation in North/South population distribution or IQ gradient, and the Dalit number assumes there is none. I can only assume he couldn't find census data by region and caste and had to assume that the castes were all distributed equally.

That's not to say there's no truth in the model. I just think the redundancies should be removed ... no separate North/South categories, just a single number for each caste. And explanations for how each number was derived would go a long way towards grounding the estimates in reality.

since you'll get 1,000 comments criticizing the post i would say that i applaud your correspondent for a good college try. it's complicated. two immediate nitpicky points

1) syrian christians, who are around 20% of kerala's population, are unlikely to be equivalent to kerala's brahmins, who are 1% of kerala's population. it's pretty certain that many of the christians derive from converts from the nair caste. (mixed in with west asians and assorted other indian groups). IOW, i do know that many syrian christians assert brahming ancestry, but that posits that 95% of brahmins converted to christian in kerala. unlikely.

2) muslims have a tendency to exhibit the same distribution of alleles in much of north india (the only place where i've seen data). e.g., in uttar pradesh (north-central india) the same haplotype frequencies found in the hindu populations, from brahmin down to dalit, seem represented in the muslims. this suggests that there wasn't that strong of a low caste skew in the converts (though more so in some regions than others). the current depressed state of india muslims is in part due to selective migration of the elites to pakistan (who became mohajirs).

if i had to bet money i'd say 90 is a more conservative and "safe" figure corrected for nutrition.

* do note that successful muslims in india are disproportionately ismailis, who are likely derived from converts from merchant castes.

Steve:"We've seen lots of evidence of an absolute Flynn effect, but little evidence of countries shifting relative average IQs"

I think this is the crux of it - India can do a lot to raise absolute IQ, but raising IQ relative to eg Europe is much harder; unless perhaps Europe's median IQ falls due to mass low-IQ immigration (which appears to have lowered the US median a couple of points, US median being 2 lower than UK although US whites score identical to UK whites).

Nutrition and urbanisation both help, but there are environmental factors raising IQ worldwide. There's no evidence I can think of that India's median IQ is likely to improve much relative to China, which still leaves a gap of 20 points or so.

I think there's also a reasonable fear that affirmative action policies in India for lower IQ groups will increase the natural economic drag of having a lower IQ population; since it means not necessarily having the most capable people in the higher level jobs.

Most elite muslims left for pakistan in 1947, the bulk of muslims left in India are descendants of dalit and peasant caste converts such as Butcher, tailor, washerman, barber, weaver, Namasudras ( a dalit agricultural worker caste in bengal )

There is a long thread on this blog started on 5-18-2008, wherein I use IQ figures for the indian diaspora and knowing the diaspora caste mix in each country, I try to calculate the IQ for each casteAnd knowing the caste mix in India, I come up with an average

Even though the nine data points are averages, if one were to plot them it would yield a distribution that is more Pareto than Gaussian (Gaussian being what I would expect it to look like).

One (or I at least) would expect that the chart would basically line up with a global one using a coarser granularity (e.g. the entire population categorized by nation of residence). If someone feeling charitable could link me to such a dataset, it would be appreciated.

The IQ of the Indian diaspora is dragged down by Northern merchants and northern peasants and still matches Ashkenazi , which means that the southern brahmin has a significantly higher iQ than the Ashkenazi

In addition for historical buffs, there is a strong historical link between brahmins and druids ( the celtic magicians )

May I also ask, how you can figure out the caste of your students

I can, because each caste tends to have certain names and I know to crack the code

In this blog, there is a thread dated 5-18-2008 which calculates the IQ of the indian diasporaIn UK, for example, academically the Indian diaspora scores at 104and this is with a mix of 40% northern peasant and 60% northern merchant, and the northern merchant calculates out to 110IQ

In addition, the darwinian pressures on Ashkenazi is about 800 years, whereas the same darwinian pressures ( high literacy ) on brahmins and merchants has been for over 3000 years

As I understand it, these are convenient labels, not to be confused with literal caste (although there is a good deal of overlap). If some of these warrior castes have had a literate tradition then they would be "merchant" or "brahmin" effectively. Most of the maharajahs of India were from peasant castes who got "converted" to warrior status by involvement in wars (Scindias); The ex-royalty of Nepal is related to these folks.

razib: I didnt know that 20% of keralites classified themselves as Syrian xtians. That number is way too large.. so its some subset of this group that would map onto Brahmin. Its almost like the people in Bihar/UP etc. who now classify themselves as Rajput (warrior caste with positive connotations) or use nondescript surnames like "Singh" or "Kumar" to get away from the caste labels.

Steve: I think the current Dalit northern number was supposed to be 70.

rec1man's hypothesis is that the north distributions are some points lower than the corresponding south distributions (as a consequence of the south being relatively insulated from the negative fallout of invasions). To falsify it, one would have to show, for example, that north indian "brahmins" who are four times as numerous as south indian "brahmins" are represented in proportion to their numbers in higher IQ professions/roles.

The hypothesized higher IQ groups only have modest effects on the mean. They do have dramatic implications for the tail.

This is a good and interesting model which helps illuminate the current potential of India, but I wouldn't include your demographic concerns as being particularly meaningful, because absolutely anything could happen by 2100. We may find methods of directly improving g.

I assume that the immigration filters in the US add +5IQ to the base iQ of each of these castes

The 20% northern peasant drags down the averages of this diaspora--

http://www.arthurhu.com/index/asind.htm

Asian Indians are the only Asian ethnic group that consistently outranks the Jews on socio-economic measures and academic awards,

--

http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/table-education-by-tradition.pdf

Post graduates Jews 35%Hindus 48%

Incomes over 100kJews 46%Hindus 43%

--http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK14Df01.html

Indians account for about 65% of the $26 billion in diamond trade revenues, up from about 25% two decades ago. The share of Jewish businessmen has apparently fallen from 70% to 25% in the same period as Indian businessmen make inroads into the traditional Jewish-dominated hub of Antwerp in Belgium and Tel Aviv.

One initial thought:With the combination of massive genetic diversity and pockets of relative genetic segregation in India I would expect a slightly larger standard deviation than e.g., in China. I'd like to see SD estimates built in at some later point.

2100 speculation aside (for example, 120 or 125 is way too high for Brahmins, as already pointed out), the *current* output of high IQ people from India is equivalent to a European country of about 100 million people. That means it is producing more high IQ brains than any country in Europe, but 2-3 times fewer than the US.

Knowledge of the IQs is useless without knowing the associated TFRs [total fertility rates].

Both the CIA & the UN had India at above 3.1 at the turn of the millenium, but plunging down to the high 2s [2.7, 2.8] a mere seven years later.

The key question for India, like all of the civilized world, is whether the high-IQ castes are still at or above 2.10 [what most demographers consider to be replacement level fertility].

I know of only a handful of high-IQ redoubts in the entire world which are maintaining replacement level rates: Israel, Utah, Alaska, Idaho, possibly Iceland, and that's about it.

In general, intelligence and & fertility are almost perfectly inverted [eg Hong Kong has the world's highest average IQ, at 107, and the world's lowest TFR, at 0.97], and pretty much everywhere you look, the demographic collapse of the civilized world is accelerating:

This is a decent try but I think the IQ estimates in Rec1Man's data are too extreme (Brahmins too high, Muslims too low). Also rather frivolous North-South split lends a false sense of precision to what is a essentially a guesstimate.

It is easy to envision a better model for estimating IQ in India

I would base it on the Indian government's quota (affirmative action on crack) system used of university admissions.

The system basically creates 3 different playing fields for students trying to enter university.

- Non-Quota [upper-caste](~20% of total population)- Other Backward Classes (~50% of total population)- Scheduled Castes and Tribes [Dalits and Tribals] (~30% of total population)

rec1man:"In SAT scores and other achievements, The Indian Diaspora in US matches Ashkenazi jews at 115IQ"

But you can't take a self-selected diaspora as necessarily typical of the larger group; certainly in the USA where Indian immigration is highly selective they're likely to be of considerably higher median ability. 120 just doesn't look right to me; for one thing it's higher than the median IQ of upper middle class white populations in Western nations. 110-115 I could credit.

Your estimates of subgroup IQ from the diasporas assumes that the diaspora is unselected, right? I find it hard to believe that the Brahmins in Silicon Valley are a respresentative sample of Brahmins from their region. Doesn't it seem more reasonable that they are an elite within the elite?

I wish I could offer some correction for that. Possibly compare the entrance exam scores of Indians who emigrated to the US with those who did not. Or try to estimate regression to the mean in US Brahmin children.

--So let me get this straight. Muslims who convert from the peasant class have a lower IQ than the Peasant class they came from? Does this make sense?--

Apparently you havent read the discussion closely enough. Most elite/upper caste muslims migrated to pakistan and in any case most muslims in the BIMARU provinces are lower caste/dalit. Theres also the cultural aspect of Islam thats anti-education etc. etc. that imposes a penalty (as can be seen from education stats from these provinces).

The trimodal classification proposed by Kailash is cruder than necessary; it implies that, of the 25 million people of school leaving age each year, about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges. So if we can use data to show that 6750 per year is too low, then the trimodal scheme can be ruled out.

We should get more data to falsify parts of or tune the 8 population model proposed by rec1man. The easiest part to falsify would be the northern vs. southern brahmin difference (and the southern vs. northern merchant difference.. I am skeptical about this). If in fact the data does not support any north vs. south difference (controlling for supercaste category), then the distinction can be dumped. My hunch is that perhaps even 8 isn't sufficient.

What is the average IQ for Indians in South Africa? While they must be poorer than SA whites, they are surely richer on average than Indians living in India? SA Indians might have been selected, but it was generations ago, and they would have regressed at least partway to the the mean.

And SA is wealthy enough that most environmental factors depressing IQ should be greatly reduced.

I just find it vary hard to believe that a region with millions of 120+ people has been so backwards for so long. OTOH, I believe it about China.

What about the historical record? Did people who interacted with South Indian Brahmins, say Arabs, or Persians, or The English during the Raj ever write "wow, these are the smartest people I've ever meet? Because people said that about European Jews.

Since the mid 90s the filter for Indians migrants to the US has not been stringent (this is when the H1B immigration increased quite a bit, probably accounting for a huge chunk (half?) of the diaspora here); the types of Indians who have been immigrating since the last 10 years are from garden variety middle-class (and even lower class) India and hardly qualify as cognitive elites. A good subset of the diaspora is here by virtue of family connections.. that is to say with minimal filters.

IIT graduates constitute less than one percent of the Indian diaspora in the US (about 30% of IIT graduates settled in USA during 1960-2000; after 2000 the numbers have dropped steeply). A drop in the bucket.

nsam:"about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges"

That's not true of the UK anyway, I went to Oxford, and no way was everyone there IQ 147+. The bottom was closer to ca 125 or so I'd say, with a median I'd guesstimate in the low 140s.

Mind you I studied Law, IQs might have been higher in the science departments. But we were easily as smart as the Humanities students.

There seems to be a general tendency to exaggerate the frequency of very high IQs. IQ 145 is 3 SDs above the mean, roughly 0.5% of the population. In the UK about 0.5% of the student-age population go to Oxford & Cambridge Universities, but of course there won't be anything like perfect overlap between the two groups.

Can you falsify the possibility that the more mediocre parts of the diaspora have average IQ of 110 (mild filtering; even an H1B visa requires a college degree), but that, say, 5-10% of the diaspora is drawn from the extreme tail of elite (in India), with IQ>130? In this model the Brahmin average in India could still be quite modest, like 105. After all, if 30% of IITians are in the US (and those are probably the top 30%!), that means a big chunk (the majority?) of the very smartest Indians are *here*.

I think there is good evidence that the current high IQ output of India is equivalent to an IQ100 country with population of 100M. (See links above.) I don't think that can be reconciled with a Brahmin population of >(10M +40M) with IQ120 and 115. In fact, it's laughable -- that would be equivalent to 10x the US Ashkenazi population, which has average IQ around 115. Certainly the contributions of US Ashkenazim are not an order of magnitude less than what is coming out of India!

rec1man here--Rob:"Did people who interacted with South Indian Brahmins, say Arabs, or Persians, or The English during the Raj ever write "wow, these are the smartest people I've ever meet?"--

About 90% of the lower civil service under the british was run by brahminsThere was a strong glass cieling

Further, poverty during british times was much higher and Unlike present wherein I assume brahmins have a Flynn deficit of 5,during british rule, with widespread famines, the flynn was 10IQ deficit for all Indians

The early xtian church fathers spent a lot of energy damning the brahmins of Alexandria

"We find St. Hippolytus attacking the Brahmanas as a source of heresy as early as the first quarter of the third country."

--

Megasthenes, the seleucid ambassador to India 300 BC

Megasthenes makes a distinction in the philosophers. He makes a division of the philosophers saying that they are two kinds - one he calls the Brachmanes and the other the Sarmanes ( buddhists ). He states,

The Brachmanes are best esteemed for they are more consistent in their opinions.

I sent my analysis to Steve as well, one of my main factors of consideration was Singapore.

Singapore's Indians are descended from indentured Southern laborers, not selected for intelligence and are probably representative of the average. Since Malays scored 92 and Chinese 108, and the Indians are usually between the two on all socioeconomic and education statistics, I estimate them at around 100 average.

I would estimate that both the Northern and Southern Brahmins average out to 110, with southerners higher and northerners lower. I say this based on experience with students from these groups compared to Ashkenazi Jews.

I do not believe that the tropical selection effect works for Indians because neither of the two main groups originate in the more tropical areas.

"In addition, the darwinian pressures on Ashkenazi is about 800 years, whereas the same darwinian pressures ( high literacy ) on brahmins and merchants has been for over 3000 years"

Maybe this was only meant as hyperbole, but if you're being serious with this reasoning, it sounds sounds pretty off to me. The selection pressure on the Ashkenazi was not "high literacy" but the mangerial niche they occupied. Is there a historical analogue for the Ashkenazi niche for the brahmins, a selection pressure for the intelligent earning more wealth and having more children? If not, then the situation for the brahmins would seem to more like that of those for the jews before migrating to Europe, living as a very literate endogamous subgroup. Such circumstance might select for higher IQ but it's not equivalent to the effect of Askenazi mangerial niche, as can be seen by the lower IQ means of Sephardic and Oriental jews who didn't fill such a niche, or atleast not to the same extent. So the 3000 to 800 yr argument seems a very poor basis for arguing that southern brahmin IQ exceeds that of the Ashkenazi.

Your estimates of subgroup IQ from the diasporas assumes that the diaspora is unselected, right? I find it hard to believe that the Brahmins in Silicon Valley are a respresentative sample of Brahmins from their region. Doesn't it seem more reasonable that they are an elite within the elite?

I wish I could offer some correction for that. Possibly compare the entrance exam scores of Indians who emigrated to the US with those who did not. --

In my model, I assume that the diaspora that emigrated to USA has an IQ 5 points above its base IQ

So the typical south Indian brahmin in the US is 5 points above his relative in India

The diaspora in other countries does not have this 5IQ filter

If we consider south Indian brahmins, most got in by the F-1 route , scholarships, Teaching and research assistantshipsTo get a scholarship, a south Indian brahmin needed over IQ140 per GRE, then as he brings in his relatives, I assume that the IQ slowly drops to 130 in the US for southern brahmin

In the US, anyone who wants can attend college, whereas in India there is a severe anti-brahmin quota in all colleges, there is a severe shortage of colleges and given widespread poverty, many cant afford to go to college

--

The above can also be used to make a crude estimate of Indian Diaspora iQ in the US

Assume IQ of the Total = 100IQ with 27% college rateand IQ of jews = 115IQ with 59% college rate

Mundane things like better nutrition and privatization of education has already made a difference in some places like the southern state of tamil nadu which rivals Bangalore as the IT capital of India.

"South India, particularly Tamil Nadu, has reaped the benefits of opening up of primary & secondary education. At first, primary education expanded through free lunch program in schools, initiated 40 years ago, and strengthened further 25 years ago. Then in the 80’s opening up of higher education created another huge wave."

from

http://tinyurl.com/4ml92q

which contains an interesting approach by an IT company (disregard college degrees, train high schoolers who dont want to or cannot afford college within 2 years and make them part of a team building complex software)

Ultimately the discussion has to go beyond IQ (even though it is a convenient place to start). The Gujaratis, who own half the hotel rooms in the USA, as a group arent exactly associated with intellectual traits but it hasnt mattered too much has it? Investment in family and social networking beyond family can make a group without large numbers of extraordinary individuals quite successful.

Standing onstage yesterday holding a big cardboard check representing the $25,000 college scholarship he had just won in the 20th annual National Geographic Bee, 11-year-old Akshay Rajagopal said: "It just feels like I'm really special."

12-Year-Old Who Scored Perfect SAT Score Wants To Remain A `Regular' KidE-Mail this report to a friend

Sonia Chopra

Vinodhini (Vino) Vasudevan When Vinodhini (Vino) Vasudevan says she wants to keep away from the media, many people are surprised

How can the first 12-year-old to score a perfect 1,600 on the SAT want to keep away from the media, many wonder. The test is conducted for gifted children by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Of the 600,000 gifted seventh- and eighth-graders the program has tracked through two decades, Vino is the first to earn perfect scores on both the math and verbal portions of the college-admissions test, said Claudia Burns, program coordinator.

--

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jun/04spec1.htm

Estimates indicate that Indian Americans constitute the largest number of medical students in the country, between 10 to 12 per cent of the total, replacing traditional Jewish American hegemony.

--120 just doesn't look right to me; for one thing it's higher than the median IQ of upper middle class white populations in Western nations. 110-115 I could credit.--

Middle class and upper middle class south Indian brahmins can run rings around upper middle class whites

--

Since 1920, Tamil Nadu brahmins in south india have faced a 70% anti-brahmin quota,

for a tamil brahmin to get into med school takes 150IQ ( my niece who stood 4th rank in 12th grade in tamil nadu, out of 200,000 ) could not get into med school due to anti-brahmin quotas, and she went into engineering

-

I have 22 siblings and first cousins - of these -5 MDs, 3 PhD, 7 Engineers, and 2 Post graduates

Due to the anti-brahmin quotas, anyone with 115IQ would be considered dumb and could not get into any professional college

I personally scored in GRE670 verbal + 780 math = 1450 = 147 IQ and could not get into IITwhich kind of suggests, entry floor into IIT is about 150IQ

--

I went to high school in a 3rd tier city in South India, and the class had 30 kids, of which 15 were southern brahmins of middle class ( their dads mostly did not have a car ) I stood 3rd

which kind of suggests that the other 2 kids were about 150IQ

Compared to high school in India, I found the competition in MS degree class in US to be easy

What is the average IQ for Indians in South Africa? While they must be poorer than SA whites, they are surely richer on average than Indians living in India? SA Indians might have been selected, but it was generations ago, and they would have regressed at least partway to the the mean.---

South Africa

Steve Sailer gives an average of 83 based on 2 IQ testsFirst, 77 raw IQ in 1925, ( by adjusting for Flynn effect should this not be closer to 93 by now )

Second , 88 raw IQ in 1990, adjusted by Flynn effect to 90 in 1992

In the same table, Steve Sailer has a white IQ in 1990raw score 94, adjusted by Flynn to 96

There is no white score for 1925which would move the white average much lower than 94By looking at UK, white scores in 1925 would probably be 85

In short white IQ is based on a single 1990 test, whereas the Indian IQ is based on an average of 1925 and 1990 scores--The Indian diaspora in South Africa is 50% northern Dalit + 50% northern peasant and scores at 90 IQ with hardly any hindu upper castes or brahminsThis was in 1990, when they still suffered from bad schools due to apartheid

Krishna Manavalli - Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone - Comparative Critical Studies 4:1 Comparative Critical Studies 4.1 (2007) 67-86 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone Krishna Manavalli Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, the popular mid-nineteenth century work of crime fiction which weaves into itself the tale of adventure of three Indian Brahmins, traces the journey of a precious yellow diamond from India to England as a part of colonial booty. Tellingly, the novel ends with the repossession of the gem by the Hindu-Brahmins. The Brahmins pursue the diamond with an unerring determination through to the end and, finally, escape with it from England to their native land. It is particularly significant that the novel concedes victory to the Brahmins over the English police and the nineteenth-century systems of Western scientific detection. Not only does this conflictual sense of poetic justice in Collins's work celebrate the heroism of the Brahmin priests, but these high-caste men are also idealized in various other ways. In forging his Gothic vision of a 'prehistoric' Hindu religion, Collins contrasts what I term the 'Brahmin Sublime' with English middle-class domesticity in order to question the latter's comfortable illusions of safety and its all

"it implies that, of the 25 million people of school leaving age each year, about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges. So if we can use data to show that 6750 per year is too low, then the trimodal scheme can be ruled out."

I didn't say anything about the SD of the IQ distribution of those people ;)

But even in homogeneous countries with good data on IQ it isn't a wise idea to assume a perfect normal distribution and start making predictions at the tails.

There are always more retards and geniuses then you would expect. (Most likely because the mechanisms involved in the determination of intelligence are interdependent to some degree.)

P.S. The IITs together admit around 4000 undergraduates each year. Many of them not high caste.

The ladies of India (especially rural India?) will have their pick of suitors. Hopefully the increased competition results in the nonviolent conquest of intelligence.

The relative shortage of women might also put extra social pressure on women (lot's of them will be their mother's only daughter) on the right side of the curve to take a few years off from software engineering and do some human engineering.

Can you falsify the possibility that the more mediocre parts of the diaspora have average IQ of 110 (mild filtering; even an H1B visa requires a college degree), but that, say, 5-10% of the diaspora is drawn from the extreme tail of elite (in India), with IQ>130? ---In my model, the Indian diaspora in the US consists of 20% northern peasant of 95+5 = 100IQ60% northern merchant, 110+5 = 115IQand 20% southern brahmin, 125+5 = 130iq

Next thanks to 70% anti-brahmin quotas against southern brahmins,with an IQ less than 130, they cant even get into 2nd tier engineering colleges--

In this model the Brahmin average in India could still be quite modest, like 105. After all, if 30% of IITians are in the US (and those are probably the top 30%!), that means a big chunk (the majority?) of the very smartest Indians are *here*.---Even this 30% of IITians is only about 20% of the southern brahmins in the USA--

I think there is good evidence that the current high IQ output of India is equivalent to an IQ100 country with population of 100M. (See links above.) I don't think that can be reconciled with a Brahmin population of >(10M +40M) with IQ120 and 115. In fact, it's laughable -- that would be equivalent to 10x the US Ashkenazi population, which has average IQ around 115. Certainly the contributions of US Ashkenazim are not an order of magnitude less than what is coming out of India!

--

I can only speak for southern brahmins, 10Mil, There is a 70% anti-brahmin quotaThat cripples the potentialThere is a large pool of quota candidates AA in most collegesSo what is coming out of India at the high end is reduced by 70%A southern brahmin with IQ less than 130 is doomed to a second rate career

15 years ago, nobody in the west even knew a large Hi-IQ pool existed in south India

As of now there are 20 mil brahmin english fluent, college graduates, who will simply suck up any white collar job that can be exported through the internet

As far as Ashkenazi , look at the second generation of the Indian diaspora and per Arthur Hu, this is acing the Ashkenazi across the board

Now keep in mind, the Indian diaspora is not the cream of Indian IQ since it is weighed down by 80% non-brahmins

In addition, India still has a lot of fabian socialism

---In this model the Brahmin average in India could still be quite modest, like 105.--

In the UK, the diaspora, non-filtered consisting of 60% northern merchant and 40% northern peasant, performs academically midway between Whites 100IQ and Chinese 108 IQSo if this blend is at 104IQhow can the brahmin be at 105IQ

In south India, 105IQ brahmins will go extinct thanks to intense anti-brahmin quotas

--

Anyways wait and see

Regarding output vs Ashkenazi, you have to look at the historical record, of wholesale export of indian civilisation to tibet, and south east asia

anonymous wrote--Is there a historical analogue for the Ashkenazi niche for the brahmins, a selection pressure for the intelligent earning more wealth and having more children?--

Historically hinduism has had a small amount of polygamy

A brahmin who cant predict eclipses and who cant chant the sanskrit mantras fluently and cannot teach in the village school will be out of a jobIf he is out of a job, nobody will marry his daughter to this unfit brahmin, whereas the fit brahmin may get 2-3 wives

I'm not sure what the point of this analysis is with respect to predicting India's future development. First, India is a democracy. That means that, like here, the political power belongs to the lummoxes, because there are more of them. So India has populist policies such as affirmative action, make-work jobs, tariffs, etc. that hinder its advancement.

Also, its national infrastructure is woeful. Jim Rogers noted this in his writing about his traveling through the country: how he was lucky to make 30mph on India's main east-west high way, which he had to share with pack animals, while he easily cruised across China's east-west highway; how he needed a different cell phone in every state in India, while one worked just fine everywhere in China, and so forth.

Rogers said there will be some investing opportunities in India -- there'd have to be in a country that big -- but as much as he enjoyed Indian culture, cuisine etc., the country as a whole wasn't ready for prime time and there were better opportunities elsewhere.

That IQ GRE conversion chart is terrible. For one, the GRE is a poor IQ test in general, since it is very knowledge-based and many of the takers who comprise the curve will care much more strongly about one section (and many won't speak English as a first language). It combines two tests with completely different distributions - an 800 math is only 92nd percentile, while only a 740 is needed for 99th in verbal. A 1000, which shows as a 111 IQ, could be a 600 math (48th %ile) and a 400 verbal (30th %ile), and it's not like the people taking it are a very elite group (college students have a 105 IQ nowadays).

But just generally, it fails the smell test, showing scores far too high.

I doubt if the selected Indian diaspora should be used to represent the entire nation of India. If I am not mistaken Nigerians now outdo all other ethnic groups in educational achievements in the U.S.A. However an island filled with say Englishmen or Koreans will always be a more advanced and desirable place to live than an island filled with Igbos and Yarubas.

I do not agree with this North South divide and the caste divisions vary a lot from state to state. For example Maharastra state in Western India is divided into Brahmin (priest), Maratha (warriors) and lower castes. There is no merchant caste as such. In the Eastern state of West Bengal (The Eastern part is now the nation of Bangladesh) Hindus are primarily made up of Brahmins, Kayasthas (A combination of scholar and warrior caste) and lower castes. The Kayasthas are not even mentioned in the analysis, a caste which had a hold on secular knowledge while Brahmins concentrated on religious knowledge. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayastha“Kayasthas were valued in the second millennia by most kingdoms and princely states as desired citizens or immigrants within India. They were treated more as a race rather than a caste because they developed expertise in Persian (the state language in Islamic India), learnt Turkish, Arabic and later Urdu, economics, administration and taxation. This gave them an edge over the Brahmins (the priestly caste), who traditionally had reserved the study of Sanskrit shastras to themselves. They successfully adapted themselves as scribes and functionaries under Islamic rule and later on under the British. Their secular viewpoint to life, adaptability and lifestyle was an asset which allowed them to succeed. The Kayastha community also adapted to changes, such as the advent of the British rule in India. They learnt English, the more affluent ones sent their children to England, and they became civil servants, tax officers, junior administrators, teachers, legal helpers and barristers. They rose to the highest positions accessible to natives in British India.”Even though Kayasthas have north Indian origin, they make a larger percentage of the population of the Eastern state of West Bengal. Most common Bengali surnames like Guha, Ghosh, Dutta, Das, Roy, Pal, Bose, Sen etc… are Kayasthas surnames.Thus rather than restrict oneself to Brahmins, the term Forward caste should be used to include all the higher IQ groups of India. Their state wise distribution is given herehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:StatewiseFC.jpg

One more fact is what kind of standard of living will Indians achieve? A nation made up primarily of Indians where their talents are not held back by any restriction of government red tape, traditional values etc… is Mauritius. A bigger version of Mauritius is what India will become in the future. Compare that to the Chinese achievements in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore and the achievements of fellow racial types in Japan and South Korea and one can safe predict that China is on a per capita basis going to be far more prosperous than India in the future. India may end up having a larger number of billionaires as it will have a massive IQ variation but on average per capita terms the Chinese and probably the Russians of the future will be far more prosperous than the average Indian. Though I expect the kind of poverty seen in Indian slums will become a thing of the past in the India of the future.

rec1man:"In India, with its poverty and lousy colleges, 39% of brahmins have a college degree or more"

I have found that Indian college degrees are not comparable to Western (or Latin American, or even African ex-British-empire territory) college degrees. There seems to be a lot of relative grade inflation. The same goes for the Arab nations and Pakistan.

Rob said--you have to look at the historical record, of wholesale export of indian civilisation to tibet, and south east asia"

This would also apply to Arabs, who do not have high IQs.--

The arabs expanded by the swordIndian expansion was peaceful by traders

Go back to 700AD, before the muslim invasions

East Asia, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan were under Sanskritic Mahayanist Bhuddhism which has thousands of hindu godsA whole host of chinese , japanese and korean emperors were Mahayanist buddhists

South east asia, was even more firmly under hindu orbitThe alphabet and the basic civilisation of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia were hindu or theravada buddhist. Bali is the sole remnant today

1. For IQ analysis, Indians can be lumped into Brahmin, Merchant Caste,Peasant Caste, Dalit and Muslim

2. During muslim rule in north India, they massacred most of the elite of anycommunity to terrorise the rest into converting to islamThis means that in north India, the upper end of the IQ curve is truncated andon average, the northern castes are now 5 IQ points below the equivalentsouthern castes. So we have to consider IQ of northern and southern castes separately

3. Per Indian SurveysBrahmins = 5%, Merchants = 15%, Peasants = 40%, Dalits+Tribals=25%, Muslims = 15%Of these 20% are in South India and 80% in North India

4. Islam also reduces the IQ of its followers by 10

5. IQ measurement in India is too inaccurate due to malnutrition levelssimilar to Africa, poor schools, poverty and illiteracy.However, the IQ of the Indian diaspora, which does not sufferthese handicaps can be measured. It is assumed that in 3 generationsas the economy improves, the IQ in India will reflect that in the diaspora

7. From Above the Lowest IQ caste is Northern Dalit and isassumed to be no less than an African relocated to west = 80 iQ

8. From Above, southern Dalit = 80 + 5 = 85 IQ

9. In Mauritius the Indian diaspora has a per capita annual gdp of $6000From the chart in IQ and wealth of nations, the IQ is predicted as 88The diaspora IQ in Fiji and South Africa which have the same blend shows that88IQ is a very conservative numberIn Mauritius, therefore , the diaspora consists of 50% Northern Dalit and50% Northern Peasant. We know that Northern Dalit = 80Therefore by algebra, we can calculate Northern Peasant = 95 IQ

10. The Northern Peasant in Canada and UK is blue collar, high schoolcomplete, middle class and this correlates with 95 IQ

13. In UK, in schools Indians perform midway between chinese ( 108 ) andwhite ( 100 ) and we can interpolate an IQ of 104 for the entire UK diasporaOf this 40% are Northern Peasants of 95 IQ and 60% of Northern MerchantsTherefore by algebra, we can calculate Northern Merchant = 110 IQ

One more fact is what kind of standard of living will Indians achieve? A nation made up primarily of Indians where their talents are not held back by any restriction of government red tape, traditional values etc… is Mauritius. A bigger version of Mauritius is what India will become in the future

Even assuming a 70% anti-Brahmin quota, I would assume the best Brahmins get into IIT. (There is little competition from other career paths now as engineering salaries have outstripped medicine, etc. -- the best will try for IIT.) So the cream of the IIT crop would be a good test of your model. You claim a population of tens of millions with avg IQ of 115-120 in India, and the IITians are drawn from this pool *plus* the rest of India.

The very best IITians inevitably end up in the US graduate system. This top pool should be equivalent to 10x the high IQ tail of Ashkenazim in the US. If you look at very high IQs, like >160, the US pool is actually dominated by Ashkenazim (do the math: even at 1% of population they dominate at the tail if their avg is 115 vs 100 for the rest). So your hypothesis would imply that at the most elite PhD programs (where the avg IQ is over 150 and good candidates are >160) the IITians would be by far the most dominant group. However, this is not what is seen. Rather, the IIT output is roughly similar to (somewhat less than) the US homegrown output. It simply isn't true that IITians dominate among, e.g., EE or CS or math or physics graduates from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/Caltech/... -- they are just one of several successful ethnic groups, but not overwhelmingly dominant as your model would imply.

Yeah, it's interesting. In fact it's a real tour de force by blog standards, perhaps the first ever. I don't necessarily agree with all of it though. I don't think any group in India has an average IQ of 120, that is extremely high. I think the estimation of Southern Brahmins is greatly exaggerated. Overall, I don't think there's much differences between regions of India, though there are differences between caste and religious groups that tend to be consistent.

Rogers said there will be some investing opportunities in India -- there'd have to be in a country that big -- but as much as he enjoyed Indian culture, cuisine etc., the country as a whole wasn't ready for prime time and there were better opportunities elsewhere.

A look on jimrogers.com shows that this was his opinion in Mar 2001. Of course we know now that he was wrong about this as growth in the Indian economy has accelerated since.

Rec1man's postings are very interesting. His is the only attempt I know of to come up with a respectable analysis of Indian IQ.

I would like to comment to those here who wonder how a relatively high IQ populace could be so "backward" for so long. This is not limited to India. China declined and suffered for 400 years, starting with the end of the Ming dynasty. Europe was stagnant and backward from the end of the Roman Empire until the enlightenment. And the only reason why Europe had the enlightenment is because the plague killed off half of the population, thus destroying the feudal system that kept Europe down.

So, any "high IQ" society can have extended stagnant periods in its history.

Also, many high IQ people are capable of self-delusion. For example, many high IQ people in the U.S. and Europe believe in liberal-left ideology or in religion.

As for the reduced IQs of muslims, I can think of two additional mechanisms of how Islam can reduce the IQ of a populace. First, Islam is by far the most proscriptive religion on the planet. Every single activity that you engage in is government by "fatwas" (there is even a fatwa for how you are supposed to brush your teeth). Such a proscriptive religion eliminates (as well as discourages it) the need for one to think for themselves. The brain, like muscles and motor skills, tend to atrophy if it is not used for extended periods of time. Thus, long-term reduction in IQ. If brain atrophy has epigenetic effects, and those epigenetic effects affect the IQ of the next generation, then the reduced IQ effect becomes multi-generational.

The second way that Islam can reduce IQ over a period of generations is that it promotes cousin marriage. The resultant inbreeding, especially of first cousin marriage, tends to cut IQ a little each generation.

Rec1man has commented that Fabian socialism is one of the things that has kept India from realizing its economic potential. Do most Indians today realize that fabian socialism was a mistake and seek to overcome it like the Chinese seek to overcome Maoism? Or do most Indians still think Fabian socialism is still desirable?

recman is rather obviously biased since he seems to be part of the group he wants to argue has a much higher IQ than Ashkenazim.

My own experience at Harvard is that the Askenazim to Indian ratio is about 15 to 1.

And of course American Jews have a vastly inferior work ethic (like all groups who have been in the US for a long time) compared to Indians, and a much older average age.

And again there is a big selection effect. About half of Ashkenazim in the world live in the US but only a tiny portion of Brahmans, who are both self-selected to seeking to come to the US, and selected by US companies wanting immigrant employees, and by having high-income (and likely high-IQ) relatives in the US already.

Not a valid assumption. Since after 2001, only the academically oriented or less talented will end up in an American college. All sorts of companies have dicovered that they can hire directly in India for local and global roles so there is little practical advantage in spending some more time in an American graduate program.

...I strongly disagree with this blog on a variety of areas, and I think the view here that IQ is almost purely genetic is way too simplistic.

I'll make a few points because I know a bit about this topic.

From what I read recently from the toronto star is that highschool dropout rates for kids who speak tamil, hindi and russian are three times lower than kids who speak spanish at home. Spanish speaking kids have a drop out rate approaching 40% in Ontario. So that would put the above three groups at around 13%. Also lower than the average dropout rate which is about 30%. The hindi and russian groups maybe "selected" groups but the kids who speak tamil are overwhelmingly refugees from Sri Lanka - people from every section of society probably even slightly sqewed to people who were deeply disadvantaged previously.

kurt:Europe was stagnant and backward from the end of the Roman Empire until the enlightenment.

It is true that "Europe" as we know it [the inheritrix of the Greek, Roman, and Messianic Jewish traditions] very nearly vanished in the Dark Ages, but Europe began to improve on those schools of thought long before any of the various "enlightenments" [Scottish, German, or other].

One thing to note is that 2 generations ago (pre 1950), many/most south indian brahmins (SIBs) were in rural environments, impoverished (even in terms of food and nutrition) with little access to education. Note that they are only 1% of the Indian population and perhaps a bigger (5% ?) chunk of the US Indian diaspora . So we are talking about a relatively small group (no more than 100,000 in number) in the USA. So all of them, including many in my and rec1man's generation, have direct (or at least second hand) memory of poverty (where one is very aware of the scarcity of simple things like food and milk). I am pretty sure that my dad and his siblings were under nourished as kids and such poverty still exists today in many other groups in India, preventing them from reaching their potential. My parents provided for me and my siblings (food and good environment) but we didnt have any luxuries (no car, no eating out etc). Now, of course its very different for the third generation who live closer to first world lifestyles.

SIBs have improved their economic standing via the expansion of educational opportunities and better nutrition/medicine, post independence (this is now happening for other groups). Due to drastic affirmative action against this group in south india, SIBs were forced to migrate to other parts of India and the world.

Circa 1970, my uncle and his family of six lived in a tiny (500 square foot) apartment in Mumbai (this was a huge step up from the extreme poverty of the village). He and his wife worked as clerks (they probably finished less than 8 years of school). Their children have science/engg PhDs from elite US univs and work in research organizations and their oldest grand kid got admits to MIT and Princeton. I am pretty sure that the parents with no college education had nothing to do with their accomplishments (except in terms of values). This type of story is pretty common (although it may take different directions.. like becoming a VP of some multinational or an inventor or whatever). Sure some have ordinary lives and barely graduate out of college or high school but its pretty rare to come across someone who is otherwise normal (no mental retardation) who would not be at least a 100 IQ (aside: there must be thousands of reasonably high IQ SIB spouses in the US who stay at home because their visa status does not allow them to work).

Their value system is also somewhat non-western in that they invest a lot in their religious rituals and family affairs and typically wont invest the kind of time/effort necessary to make the big name/fame in academia/society etc. (although a few do that!). On average, they lack the self promotion skills that put people at an advantage in western societies (this is not the case with successful north indian merchant castes, viz. people like vinod khosla).

So its certainly not out of the realm of possibility that SIBs (south indian brahmin) groups are associated with the kind of numbers put forward by rec1man (despite him and myself belonging to this group). If he is wrong, then at most by 5 points (reduce his numbers by 5 points).

my own daughter was adjudged the best math and language student in an entire grade level (probably 400 or 500 students) in a high school in a somewhat well known US university town (I was a little surprised.. maybe this tells something about the type of education that US school kids are getting). And while she is a well rounded student and likes the US system, I doubt she could deal with the rigors/craziness of the Indian high school system and college entrance exams (most IIT professors send their kids to ordinary colleges as they cant make it in the entrance exams and have no way to get over AA quotas). My nephew who was supposedly a top student in a Delhi school didnt make it to the IITs and had to settle for a Delhi university engineering course. The competition is crazy and probably distorts real learning.

If we consider the narrow topic of IQ, I wouldnt rule out SIBs having similar profiles as other outlier groups. If they fail to convert that into other outcomes, other factors could be at work.

As for the relevance of IQ and various groups in India, the key issue seems to be of governance. Indian politics is mostly driven by folks from the peasant castes (who are the beneficiaries of AA) and this obviously creates huge inefficiencies. So unlike more homogeneous China, getting a system to divide the spoils in a way that wont piss off one group or another seems key (and the capitalism model seems to be the best hope as the growth in the private sector makes quotas and such less relevant as corporates will use their own hiring criteria. unlike the USA. corporates can use their own IQ tests to hire employees, taking out some of the sting of the quotas).

Though I do not agree in the north south divide among non-Brahmins, among Brahmins I will agree on the remarkable achievements of Tamil Brahmins. Though Brahmins from throughout India tend to be a successful intelligent lot, Tam Brahmins are the cream of the creams. Many of my close friends were Tam Brahmins, the guy who repeatedly topped my class in my school in Maharastra was a Tam Brahmin (Iyer) in a classroom made up of Maharastrians (Western Indians the people who created the Hindu Maratha empire), Gujrathi Jains, Kerelian Christian (from the South), Punjabis (from the North), Bengalis (from the East, the same ethnic group as Bangladeshis) and others. I do not know if they are smarter than Ashkenazis. But one thing which did strike me is the trouble Tam Brahmins tend to have competing with Slavonic Europeans and the Chinese in programming competitions, something in which they dominate in the industry. Most IIT and BUET (Bangladesh’s version of IITs) teams as well as American Universities having Southern Brahmins and Indians in their teams repeatedly struggle against Chinese and Eastern European Universities in these competitions. One being the ACM programming competition held by IBM. Note most IITs perform dismally in them.http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htmhttp://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/v2/default.asp?page=results

Most Eastern European teams may have Ashkenazis in them but will definitely include more Slavonics. I wonder if we are underestimating the intellectual ability of Slavonics. One of my Polish friends (who topped his Electronics Engineering BSc class in England BTW) was boasting that Poles are beating everybody in brawns (he was refering to the four times winner of the Strongest Man competition Mariusz Pudzianowski) and brains. Besides some of the Indian names which crop up in past winner lists of the IBM ACM contest in Western teams are Rajiv Gupta (California Institute of Technology) who is a North Indian and Vivek Sarkar (Stanford University) a Bengali Kayastha. No Tam Brahmins!The same with the International Olympiad in Informaticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics

Virtually all the winners are Europeans and Chinese. No Tam Brahmin and a lot of Slavonic and Baltic names. Will Bangalore be out-programmed by Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the future?

Same with top coder winnershttp://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRankhttp://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574855&tab=alg

Petr could be Ashkenazi, most probably is Russian but is definitely not a Tam Brahmin. I am not saying not winning these competitions means you are low IQ as other high IQ groups like Swedes, Northern Italians, Japanese and Koreans have hardly won these competitions but I was expecting some Southern Brahmins in them as they tend to dominate the programming industry.

Rec1man has commented that Fabian socialism is one of the things that has kept India from realizing its economic potential. Do most Indians today realize that fabian socialism was a mistake and seek to overcome it like the Chinese seek to overcome Maoism? Or do most Indians still think Fabian socialism is still desirable?--

I strongly disagree with this blog on a variety of areas, and I think the view here that IQ is almost purely genetic is way too simplistic.

I'll make a few points because I know a bit about this topic.

From what I read recently from the toronto star is that highschool dropout rates for kids who speak tamil, hindi and russian are three times lower than kids who speak spanish at home. Spanish speaking kids have a drop out rate approaching 40% in Ontario. So that would put the above three groups at around 13%. Also lower than the average dropout rate which is about 30%. The hindi and russian groups maybe "selected" groups but the kids who speak tamil are overwhelmingly refugees from Sri Lanka - people from every section of society probably even slightly sqewed to people who were deeply disadvantaged previously.

Now even though Brahmins have higher IQ as compared to the rest of India due to Darwinist pressures similar to Ashkenazis, they makeup only a tiny fraction of India’s population. As far as the remaining population is concerned their IQ falls in the same range as that of what can be called as the ‘Brown’ group of nations. What I have observed while reading ‘IQ and wealth of nations’ was that there is a hierarchy of colour in IQ averages which ‘Yellows’ on top, followed by ‘Whites’, followed by ‘browns’ (and ‘reds’) and with ‘blacks’ making up the bottom of the barrel. Gulf Arabs (Kuwaitis, Saudis etc…), Persians, Turks, North Africans (Algerians, Moroccans etc…) , Native Americans (Cree, Iroquois etc…), Hispanics (Mexicans, Columbians etc…), South East Asians (Thais, Malays, Filipinos etc…), South Asians (Indians, Sri Lankans etc…) and probably Polynesians and Maoris tend to have overlapping ‘average IQ ranges’ sandwiched between the Whites and North East Asians above and Blacks below. What is strange is that while some from the above group like Arabs, Persians and Aztecs built big empires others like the Maoris never went beyond big tribal alliances. IQ though one important factor is not the only one determining the ability of a people to build civilizations or win wars. The requirements of the pre-Industrial era were different than now. Some groups were better in practical inventions and warfare while others excelled in theoretical thinking and theology. East Asians were rarely defeated and conquered by outsiders even after several attempts. China was never colonised like India was even though several European nations, Japan and the United States attempted to do so. Japan was never colonised in the same way as India or Malaysia. Mongol armies on the other hand massacred non East Asian armies with ease, may they be Middle-Eastern, European or South Asian. Thus militarily East Asians were more dominant compared to the rest of the world, they made better weapons and used superior strategy yet Shinto, Taoism or Korean Musok never had much influence outside East Asia. Similarly non Europeans have normally struggled to conquer Europe. Events like the Persian defeat in Greece, the defeat of Carthaginian forces by the Romans, Charles Martel’s routing of the Arabs, the Turkish defeat at Vienna etc… show how hard a nut Europe was to crack. South Asia fell nearly completely under Islamic rule yet the Islamic forces with all the might of the Turkish Empire behind them had only limited and a costly military success in Europe. The same Europe virtually completely dominated the world later during the colonial era. Yet European religions like the Greco-Roman, Norse (worship of Odin), Slavic, Druidic Celtic never had much influence outside Europe (except that there are strange similarities between ancient Persian, Hinduism and the European pagan religions) and have nearly been wiped out. On the other hand Hindus and Jews have been military losers in the bigger scheme of things but had a much greater influence from a religious point of view on the world stage. India might have influenced China through Buddhism but could never have conquered China militarily as I believe the Chinese would have superior weapons and strategy. It is as if populations from the frigid-colder temperate regions (Northern Asians, Northern Europeans) have a more practical bent of mind and are better at inventing superior complex tools while the opposite is true for the ‘brown’ populations of the warmer temperate-tropical regions (Arabs, Indians etc…) who tend to be better at subjects like metaphysics, philosophy etc…The northerners (Northern Asians, Northern Europeans) also tend to be socially more disciplined as compared to the ‘brown’ populations of the warmer temperate-tropical regions.

"Just because barbarians sometimes win battles over civilised people does not make them higher IQThe mongols, the huns the vandalsall destroyed Rome and China

Heck even the british managed to topple china during the opium wars"

Are you crazy? The Vandals were basically Germans so I am sure they were very high IQ. The Mongols are racially similar to the Japanese and Chinese and I thus believe were high IQ too. The British started the Industrial revolution. That itself makes them high IQ. The British and Germans combined would be responsible for a large chunk of all modern technological inventions even if you exclude Ashkenazis.

So while IQ is a convenient proxy for potential ability, introducing a motivational parameter will clarify matters a great deal (which has genetic influences, like temperament)

Indian empires AFAIK never had a missionary zeal for expanding their empires or conquest. Similarly, the average Indian (especially the south indian) isnt particularly assertive (he is talkative, a different matter) or has a particular wish to leave his mark on the planet. This is entirely consistent with his metaphysics (endless cycles of birth etc.) which doesnt make death as terrifying as it to the adherents of judeao-xtian traditions. The Hindu world view is ahistoric (not tied in any crucial way to historical events such as the birth and death of Jesus for example).

So my hunch is that the motivational counterpart of IQ (drawing from genetic sources such as temperament as well as memetic aspects like the meaning and purpose of life) will vary markedly across groups. Two groups with similar IQ (eg, South Indian Brahmins and Jews) may have very divergent outcomes based on contrasting motivational drivers (something similar probably applies to a contrast say between the Scandinavians and the Italians) Based on my casual observation of Jewish academics, I doubt their level of drive and motivation to leave a mark on the discipline is equalled by any other group. And this motivational parameter must, in part, be culturally transmitted after having been tuned over generations.

However, Sonia congress, commies, xtian missionaries all support fabian socialism since it is easy to fool the backward segments of society with promises of free lunch

Exactly right. This is why universal education in India had to wait for the advent of the first stable BJP-led government. Now that the Congress, communists and xtian missionaries are in power they are doing their best to spike the progress made on universal education.

As a follow-up to the need for including a motivational parameter that varies across groups

It just occurred to me that status seeking which is such a huge motivator for male accomplishments in most societies may be muted in traditional indian society.

If caste, especially being a upper caste such as a south indian brahmin, provided hereditary status with religious/societal sanction, there's no particular pressure to go after status seeking/empire building for the males (beyond the demands of leading a tolerable life)

for other indian groups, status seeking and status displays may be a much bigger deal (although I couldnt quite tell which ones.. the punjabis and marwaris come to mind)

I would like to congradulate Rec1Man on his bold attempt to estimate Indian IQ, even if it does smack a bit of ethnic triumphalism. I do, however, have doubts about how he seems (implicitly) to view academic credentials and economic success as nearly perfect measures of IQ and other indicators of g. Whereas measures of g seem to indicate to a large extant the quality of one's mind (basically to deal with complexity and abstractions and assimilate information), academic and economic performace, although correlated with g, are due to many other factors as well.

Setting aside the comparability of degrees granted in different nations (and my personal experience is the same as Simon's who noted that the consistency and quality of degrees from developing countries can often be spotty), I would imagine that cultural factors also play a large role. Things such as intact families that place an emphasis on education and discipline for their children and an entrepreneurial culture would have positive effects. Flynn has pointed out that East Asian academic and socioeconomic performance in the US far outstrips what one would predict based upon their (above average) IQs. Jews in the US also outperform expectations based on their very high average IQs, while low IQ groups, such as blacks and hispanics underperform their IQs.

Cultures almost certainly reflect the IQ distribution of their constituent members, but they work the other way as well, influencing the behavior of their members. A stable family structure, emphasis on education and demands that the children succeed and better their position can help beyond IQ. For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement. I do not think this is necessarily out of line. I could easily see that intact family structures emphasising success and hard work could enable a population with slightly lower g to do better academically than a narcissistic Western population with a collapsing family structure that no longer requires personal responsibility such as Britain's. (See Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" and "Our Culture, What's Left of It" for a discription of this).

I have no doubt that the Indian diaspora here in the US is higher in g than the average American (and may or may not be as high as the the average Jewish American), but Rec1Man's offering of spelling bee finalists as proof of staggeringly high IQs is somewhat doubtful. A lot of it is recent immigrant parents pushing their children to excel, whereas those who have been corrupted by many generations of affluence in the US tend to indulge their children rather than push them. When I was in (a private) high school I was in the track that took mostly honors/AP courses and almost all of my sectionmates where National Merit Scholarship finalists or commended (I was a finalist ;-). We were a diverse group consisting of WASPs (of which I was one), Catholics, Jews, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans. All of us were good students and did extremely well on the SAT, but I was always astounded how hard the Asian parents (South and East) pushed their children to excel compared to those of their Christian and Jewish classmates. We were usually more interested in pursuing our own interests or planning our next ski trip or vacation was going to be. Even though I've been out of highschool for more than a decade, whenever I visit Barnes & Nobel or Borders to browse for books and grab a coffee I see nothing has changed. I always see tons of East and South Asian kids sitting there diligently studying, whereas the few white kids are invariably sitting gossiping over coffee. My point is that the hunger for success from new immigrants from cultures with the right characteristics can greatly aid inherent benefits from g in achieving success and SES and academic data are not necessarily ideal proxies for estimating population differences in g.

--This top pool should be equivalent to 10x the high IQ tail of Ashkenazim in the US. If you look at very high IQs, like >160, the US pool is actually dominated by Ashkenazim (do the math: even at 1% of population they dominate at the tail if their avg is 115 vs 100 for the rest). So your hypothesis would imply that at the most elite PhD programs (where the avg IQ is over 150 and good candidates are >160) the IITians would be by far the most dominant group. However, this is not what is seen.--

I think you dont understand the basic motivation of any IIT or similar south indian brahmin techie

Doing a PhD is not high on the list of goals

The goal is to do a masters and get a job and send money home to his parents / siblings / cousins etc , and get a bride arranged from home

Only those who cant get a job after their masters go on to PhD

--

I did not get into IITbut I can tell you my experience in a Masters program at a famous univ in North Carolina

There were 5 Euro-Americans and myself in the class

In the first test, the Euro-Americans who were studying for MS , they got between 57% to 62%I got 98%

At that time the west was not aware of the pool of Hi-IQ talent among the upper castes and brahmins and were not aware having a southern brahmin in the class could bust the grading curve,even in post graduate courses

A stable family structure, emphasis on education and demands that the children succeed and better their position can help beyond IQ--

Absolutely correct

Even Dalits and backward castes have very strong family values and I expect them to outperform their IQ-g

--

In addition, there is a question of which IQ, which is why I prefer SAT / GRE

There is at least verbal-g and math-g

Tests like Ravens matrices, which do not have a verbal component, assume that the testee has similar levels of verbal-g and math-gand may not measure over-performance or under-performance in verbal or math g

Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

Furthermore, while doctors certainly make a lot of money, they do so only after a very long and expensive education and residency, and with surgeons at least cannot stay at the top for nearly as long an age. You can be a senator, lawyer, judge, professor, or hedge fund manager well into your 70's and 80's if you so choose.

Finally, the very smartest of the smart would be wise NOT to go into medicine because there is much less of a "superstar" system.

Let me put in this way. There is really not much financial advantage in being a doctor with a 160IQ v a 150IQ. By contrast, in finance, law, or academia, there certainly is.

Anyway, it is not my burden to disprove that South Indian Brahmans have IQ's substantially higher than Ashkenazim, which I frankly find absurd given the relative contributions to our intellectual heritage by each group.

It is well proven that Ashkenazim have an IQ averaging about 115, and this is rather obvious when you go to the places where very high IQ people dominate: Harvard, Wall Street, Congress, etc.

You're the one making the claim, and so far you have no evidence other than your unsourced assertions, such as the average IQ of SIBs who come here on academic visas is 140.

anon:"For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement."

This tallies with my experience - I find white British undergrads tend to be smart but lazy and often do poorly; while non-Muslim south Asian undergrads generally work harder and do better even though they are more likely to have trouble with concepts; the same is true for black African students. I don't know if Islam directly lowers IQ but certainly Muslim students are often lazy; this isn't true of all female students (although true of many, especially those in strict hijab) but it seems to be true of pretty well all British Muslim males I've encountered.

"Another lesson to be read off the trade figures is that a relatively small fraction of British trade involved colonies that would later constitute the "Third World." Indeed, the only trade surpluses in the table are with India, Africa, the West Indies, and the Far East, which might give some heart to Marxist claims that British colonies, especially India, were the outlet for Capitalist "excess production." However, the trade surpluses are small, and overall British trade with India and the other colonies is hardly larger than with the much, much smaller populations of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. No serious argument can be made that the likes of Australia and New Zealand, with their own autonomous governments and protective tariffs, were being "exploited" by Great Britain. Instead the largest British export market is simply with the rest of Europe. Indeed, Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, etc. are the places where more people would have enough money to buy British goods."

The claim that Britain looted India by exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials are unfounded. Indeed even at the height of the British Empire it was the Americans who were 'looting' Great Britain. This whole looting fairy tale bores me now a days. Persia was hardly 'looted' but it has not left them very rich has it but Hongkong even after a century of British 'looting' is very prosperous.

Rec1man, When you used SAT data, did you assume that 20% of the Hindu test-takers were Brahmin, in line with the Indian-American population? Because between other groups, there is a big gap between higher and lower IQ participation rates. We should expect a massive difference in SAT participation over a 2 sd+ gap.

Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

Furthermore, while doctors certainly make a lot of money, they do so only after a very long and expensive education and residency, and with surgeons at least cannot stay at the top for nearly as long an age. You can be a senator, lawyer, judge, professor, or hedge fund manager well into your 70's and 80's if you so choose.

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The Indian 2nd generation is influenced by their parentswho are using their experience in India

In the Indian context, either you are a doctor or an engineer or you are a failure

Indian schools have a 3 tier system in 11 and 12 gradeThe top tier is the science streammath, medicine, engineering ,science

The second tier is commerce, law, finance etc

The 3rd tier is arts for those who simply need a degree

Only 2nd tier people in India go into finance , law etc

Indians in the USA as a practical matter will face a glass ceiling / old boy network if trying for diplomacy or elected office

The other aspect is engineering or medicine is a low risk enterprise, almost everyone makes 100k to 200k, whereas in these other professions it is hit or miss

The Indian immigrants are 2-3 generations away from semi-starvation and want no part of risk

However, southern brahmins

As far as upper academia, it is not considered lucrative since you have to study 5 years beyond BS and an assistant Prof makes no more than 60k

Is this consistent with your model? Granted that Orissa and Rajasthan are two of the most backward Indian provinces? Are the inequalities in these states are even more extreme than what your model might presuppose?

abstract--------This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the extent that these two states can represent India, the two statements "for every ten top performers in the United States there are four in India" and "for every ten low performers in the United States there are two hundred in India" are both consistent with the data. The combination of India's size and large variance in achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the building blocks for substantive research on the correlates of earnings inequality in India and other low-income countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to internationally comparable tests.

Basically on this board, there seems to be a broad consensus on Indian IQ of Dalits, peasants etc and an eventual 90IQ floor based on Mauritius and South Africa , where upper castes and brahmins are mostly absent

I seem to cross a red line, when I assert that southern brahmins exceed Ashkenazi IQ

Many board members even suggest as low an IQ as 105 for southern brahmins

Performance Output depends on both iq and infrastructureI suggest that the Ashkenazi performance is boosted by the advantage of living in a 100IQ society with per capita of $40kand not facing 70% AAvs southern brahmins living in a 92IQ society ( depressed by flynn to 85) and a per capita of $1k

20 years ago, no one suspected a hi-iq pool in southern India,and 20 years from now as the Indian economy improves, nobody will question the iq of southern brahmins. Everything on the hitech end such as software, nukes, missiles, moon rocket, comes 65% from southen brahmins

I have seen jews, or the lack thereof, up close , in the hitech fields in the US for nearly 30 years. I have seen plenty of chinese and vietnamese and indians but almost no jews

Ashkenazi over-performance is a matter of the last 400 years onlyBrahmins fill a niche analogous to Druids among the celts

There is also the matter of ignorance of oriental history among this blog

They did not choose Fabian socialismNehru when he went to college in UK got influenced by the English socialists, Lasker etc

That sort of makes one wonder why he was so easily led. After all, Adam Smith had enormous influence on a great many thinkers. Does socialism fit well with Hindu civilization?

Taking a step back for the nitty-gritty of the discussion. I think we only criticize the Brahmin numbers because it is well-known that many populations have low average IQ, so any numbers you assigned below 100 don't require extraordinary evidence.

The claim that SIBs are the highest IQ population on earth is extraodinary. Would you be willing to share your dataset and sources?

anonymous wrote--Anyway, it is not my burden to disprove that South Indian Brahmans have IQ's substantially higher than Ashkenazim, which I frankly find absurd given the relative contributions to our intellectual heritage by each group.

--

The arab mathematics that lay the foundation of the industrial revolution in the west came from India

In arabic schools mathematics is called Hindsa

(Hindu-knowledge)

Try doing calculations with roman numerals

Here is a small list of pre-newtonian mathematics that came from India through the arabs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics

Fields of Indian mathematics

Some of the areas of mathematics studied in ancient and medieval India include the following:

anonymous wrote--Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

--

Actually when citibank went bust, they did not invite an Ashkenazi to take overThey invited Vikram Pandit, a Southern Maharashtrian brahmin

( the boundary line between southern and northern brahmins is the Narmada river in India )--

In running for elected office, Hindu candidates face open attacks on their religion Swati Dandekar and Satveer choudhary, both got elected despite their republican opponents running an open smear campaign against their religious background

--

Indira Nooyi, CEO of pepsico is also a southern brahmin

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And let us see how jews fail to compete against Indian northern merchants

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FB19Df04.html

Indeed, Indian diamond traders are progressively displacing the Jewish community that dominated this trade in Belgium's diamond city - Antwerp - and are now calling for better representation on Antwerp's High Diamond Council, the powerful regulatory body in the trade. This, Indian traders say, has raised the ire of some of the other global diamond trading communities.

In fact, in a provocative report, the Wall Street Journal said recently that, "Indians are among the world's most successful newcomers. They have reinvigorated the jewelry districts in New York and Hong Kong and revived the US motel industry; they are among the programmers of choice in Silicon Valley and Berlin. In the global diamond world, Indians have been so successful that they are challenging Jewish dealers, even in Tel Aviv. About 80 percent of all polished diamonds sold worldwide pass through Indian hands."

proof reader wrote--Speaking for the simpler minds here: can we reach to an agreement to this discussion?

-Are South Indian Brahmins to be our new overlords displacing Ashkenazis?

-Does Indian IQ hover around 95, or simply around world average 85?

-Can India successfully challenge China for number 1 status in 2100? (I'm not talking about the Olympics)

- Is rec1man none other than Godless Capitalist on a ethnocentric mood?

Thanks in advance.

--

I am not Godless Capitalist

IMHO, as the Indian economy expands the floor of the Indian IQ will prove to be somewhere above 90 and the ceiling less than 94

IMHO, as far as Avg IQ, India will be 10 - 11 points below china

At the high end, it depends on the chinese SD, whether it is 15, 10, 7.5 or 6and the individual bell curves of the Merchant caste and Brahmins

You can plug in the numbers and have various IQ benchmark levels120, 130, 140 etc

Run the numbers for various scenarios at the high end IQ and you will be surprised

IMHO, in 20 years, it will be self evident that Southern brahmins will be on topA southern brahmin who is not a doctor or an engineer is considered second rate IQ and with 70% AA a southern brahmin with 115 IQ cant even get into a science college thanks to AA and needs 130+ to get an engineering seat

anon:"For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement."

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In the IQ test, how many jat sikh northern peasants and how many patel northern merchants ??

Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement.-- and he goes on about family pressures towards education

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In this UK study, Indians, whites and chinese are compared

I can assume that the chinese 108IQ have the same family pressures towards education as the Indians and the chinese have a certain Delta in grades above the whites

The Indians who have the same family motivations as the 108IQ chinese have half the Delta over whites and thats how I came up with 104

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Indian IQ in UK has been badly mismeasuredA decade ago it was 85, then 97 more recently and Lynn has made all kinds of wild assumptions without looking at the first basic questionWhat is the caste background of the Indians in the IQ test

Thats why I prefer SAT and other similar tests, since it reflects the combined score of the caste blend

[Posting again as this seems to have gotten lost since submitted yesterday].

I think it's pretty clear rec1man is not an unbiased researcher in this field :-)

Your only response to my IIT analysis is that since 2000 most of the best have not come to the US but rather stayed in India? Firstly, this is implausible (an IIT senior who gets into, e.g., Stanford or MIT would be an idiot not to come to the US even for a few years to get a masters or PhD), but let me just accept it for a moment.

This does nothing to explain the pre-2000 observation that IITians have come nowhere near to dominating US graduate programs (although they've done well, they have not in any way dominated), which would have had to be the case if they were the best of a 10-40M population of avg IQ115-120.

Do the math, please, and compare with the Ashkenzi and european American high IQ populations that they were competing with in US grad schools -- what would you say is the number of IQ>160 individuals in the various pools? Let's take the following numbers, in the spirit of your previous claims: (assume SD=15 in all cases)

Keep in mind that Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences were minimal, with the exception of a few isolated giants (typically Sephardic) like Spinoza. Ashkenazis were insular and, while they made money, didn't contribute much at all to the general culture. Then from about the 1820s, great Ashkenazi artists and scientists appear in ever increasing numbers.

So, Indians might be like Ashkenazis in 1825. Or like gentile Russians, who made almost no cultural contribution at the high end of Western civilization, until after 1825.

It's possible, but highly improbable. India has a relentlessly meritocratic system of selection for the IITs, and the best from that system come to the US. The students who get into IIT are lionized (e.g., in the popular press) in India and many Indians can remember, from a young age, dreaming of admittance. Rec1man himself dwells on the fact that he was denied admission.

So we already have a good idea of what the cream of the crop there looks like. A careful quantitative analysis contradicts the proposal that there is a 10-40M population with avg IQ 115-120 in India.

Rec1man's most important point in this entire thread is his observation that if the Chinese SD is anywhere near 15, the largest repository of super high IQ individuals is there. That is why it is an interesting question, addressed in previous discussion on your blog, what the NE Asian SD is.

This is a much better version of the one given above. This joke will give you a brief idea about the various tribes of India. I have included a map here to give you an idea of the states. Hope India’s ethnic jungle becomes a bit clearer to you.POLITICAL MAP OF INDIAhttp://bhagya.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/india-map.gifThe map is outdated as three new states has been created

MALAYEES (Native to the Southernmost State of Kerela)One Malayalee is a narial-pani shop. (narial-pani = coconut juice)Two Malayalees is a boat race. Three Malayalees is a Gulf job racket. Four Malayalees is an oil slick.

TAMILIANS (Natives to the Southernmost State of Tamil Nadu speaking a Dravidian language Tamil)One Tamilian is a fugitive sandalwood smuggler. Two Tamilians is a suicide-bomb squad. Three Tamilians is a classical music school. Four Tamilians is a Jayalalitha fan club. (Jayalalitha is a famous politician in that state)

ANDHRAITES (Natives to the Southern State of Andhra Pradesh)One Andhraite is a cycle-rickshaw driver. Two Andhraites is a spice shop. Three Andhraites is a Naxalite outfit. (Naxalite = Maoist rebels)Four Andhraites is the Telugu film industry. (Telugu = language of Andhra Pradesh, not related to the Aryan languages of north but to Tamil of South)

BENGALIS (Natives to the Eastern State of West Bengal, the same guys as Bangladeshis only Hindu majority, speaking an Aryan language Bengali)One Bengali is a rosagulla shop. (rosagulla = a famous sweet made of cheeseball in sugary syrup)Two Bengalis is a black-and-white movie. Three Bengalis is a Mohum Bagan support group. (Mohan Bagan football club in Calcutta)Four Bengalis is a Marxist movement.

RAJASTHANIS (Natives to the Northern state of Rajasthan, state of desert and palaces)One Rajasthani is a cattle-seller. Two Rajasthanis is a mason. Three Rajasthanis is a puppet show. Four Rajasthanis is a folk dance-drama.

GOANS (Natives to the tiny western state of Goa, unlike the rest of India it was a Portuguese colony)One Goan is Remo Fernandes. (famous Goan rock star)Two Goans is a Feni distillery. (Feni = local booze)Three Goans is a football club. Four Goans is an all-night long beach party.

MANGALOREANS (Natives in a part of the southern State of Karnantaka cantered around the city of Mangalore )One Mangalorean is a supari seller. (Supari = Betelnut)Two Mangaloreans can't stand one another. Three Mangaloreans is an Udupi restaurant. Four Mangaloreans is a fanatical Konkani Sabha.

BOMBAYITES (Bombay city also called Mumbai)One Bombayite is a hawker. Two Bombayites is a film industry. Three Bombayites is a slum. Four Bombayites is the rush-hour train crowd.

MAHARASHTRIANS (Natives to the Western State of Maharastra, builders of the Great Hindu Maratha Empire speaking an Aryan language Marathi)One Maharashtrian is a bus conductor. Two Maharashtrians is a kabaddi match. (kabaddi = type of sport)Three Maharashtrians is a Ganapati procession. (Ganpati = Elephant headed God of Hinduism)Four Maharashtrains is a Shiv Sena shakha. (Shiv Sena shaka = Marathi Hindu nationalist Party, Shaka means branch)

GUJARATIS (Natives to the Western state of Gujrat speaking an Aryan language Gujarati well known as good businessmen)One Gujarati is a share broker in a Mumbai train. Two Gujaratis is the total chatter in a Mumbai train. Three Gujaratis is a rummy game in a Mumbai train. Four Gujaratis is a dandiya-raas session all night long. (Dandiya Raas = Gujrat folk dance)

KUTCHIES (Natives to a part of Gujrat state)One Kutchie is a kirana shop. (kirana = grocery) Two Kutchies is a stationery shop. Three Kutchies is a saree shop. (Saree = common dress worn by Indian women)Four Kutchies is the entire Bombay retail trade.

SARDARJIS (Sikhs)One Sardarji is a truck driver. Two Sardarjis is a roadside dbaha. (eatery)Three Sardarjis is a terrorist outfit. Four Sardarjis are always found in jokes.

SINDHIS (Hindus from the Pakistani province of Sindh, speaking an Aryan language Sindhi)One Sindhi is a currency racket. Two Sindhis is a papad factory. (papad = papadom)Three Sindhis is a duplicate goods shop. Four Sindhis is a lot of gas around (yeech!).

BIHARIS (Natives from the northern state of Bihar speaking Bihari a language very similar to Hindi)One Bihari is Laloo Prasad Yadav. (He is the Ex- chief minister of Bihar)Two Biharis is a booth-capturing squad. Three Biharis is a caste killing. Four Biharis is the total literate population of the state.

BHAIYYAS (Natives from the northern state of Utter Pradesh where people speak Hindi)One Bhaiyya is a milkman. Two Bhaiyyas is a chanawala (or panipuriwala). (Roadside eateries on hand carts just like Hot Dog stands in America)Three Bhaiyyas is a temple-destruction squad. Four Bhaiyyas is a halwai shop. (Sweet shop)(And 12 Bhaiyyas is one SMALL family).

KASHMIRIS (Natives to the northernmost state of Kashmir known for their separatism as the majority population is Muslim, the only one in India)One Kashmire is a boatman. Two Kashmiris is a carpet factory. Three Kashmiris is a tourist agency. Four Kashmiris is a terrorist outfit.KANNADIGAS (Natives of the southern state of Karnataka, the state containing Bangalore speaking Kannad a non Aryan language related to Tamil, Malyali and Telugu)One Kannadiga is a coffee estate. Two Kannadigas is a Udupi restaurant. Three Kannadigas is a pepper powder factory. Four Kannadigas is an anti-Cauvery squad. (Cauvery river dam controversy)

PUNJABIS (Natives from the northern state of Punjab who also make up the largest ethnic group of Pakistan speaking Punjabi a Aryan language related to Sanskrit)One Punjabi is chhole-bathure 5 times a week. Two Punjabis is one bottle of whisky in one night. Three Punjabis is a public fist-fight. Four Punjabis is 200 kg of excess weight.

PARSIS (Descendants of Persians who fled the Islamic invaders of Persia)One Parsi is a sentence punctuated with BC's and MC's. Two Parsis is a doctor and a lawyer. Three Parsis is a 75 year old and man his two unmarried sisters. Four Parsis is half their remaining population.

In marketing/management and maybe some other areas in biz schools many Indians in the 80s and beyond saw an opportunity to enter academic fields that were relatively under-developed and paid well (compared to the more established areas in humanities or social sciences). I dont know if its still true but there are tons of these folks (as any random perusal of any marketing/business journal will tell) all over the place. In the end, it was simply a cold economic calculation (for their relatively modest talents, this was the best place to make dollars without too much effort or risk) and not so much an innate driven desire to contribute to human knowledge :-) And yes, a significant subset of this group are SIBs.

From current and past Indian achievements it seems highly likely that there is a substantial discrete Indian population (or populations) with IQ well above 100; probably skewed towards non-verbal IQ. This is already impressive given that the global mean IQ is below 90. And in the future this group may well become much more prominent on the global stage.

But as anon indicates above, there just isn't any evidence for "5x as many IQ>160 people *just in the Brahmin groups* as in the entire USA, counting Ashkenazim". Such claims look more like the IQ-by-US-state hoax data (with its IQ 115 Democrat states vs IQ 85 Republican states) than like any real IQ data I've ever seen.

As far as the UK, well I have an MSc in Electronics Engineering from an English University in Northern England and am doing a PhD in the same place, so I have seen some years of MSc classes. The course was quite comprehensive and reasonably difficult. The MSc toppers in all of the three last years have either been Euros or Chinese even though there are a lot of Indians from good backgrounds. In one year there was an Indian who made it to the second position and he was a Tam Brahmin from Pilani University (one of those universities ranked just below the IITs) in India but whose father was an IITian. But the guy who made it to the top that year was a reddish/ blond haired Scotsman who was most probably not Ashkenazi at all. One year it was a Pole in the top spot followed by an Englishman (None seemed Ashkenazi to me). The other year it was a Chinese guy who spoke really bad English but was brilliant in Engineering. The girl who came second that year with the Chinese was a Swede (so much for dumb Swedes). In all the three years I have seen Africans (mostly Nigerians) lagging behind with many ending up with a diploma rather than a degree.

One night when I was in the department building working late, I remember seeing a combined group of Indians and Nigerians trying to steal the assignment of that Scotsman from a secure submission box (They nearly picked up the heavy box and tilted the whole thing) as they could not solve a complex problem given in the assignment on their own. It was the last day of submission and they copied the whole damn thing from the Scotsman’s assignment and most of them did not understand what they were copying.

What I have found was that British and European students are very bright but take it easy. Asians and Africans on the other hand have a greater drive though I have serious doubts about African intellectual abilities after my experience in the UK. I think Africans will make really good car salesmen but I would not trust Engineering work of any kind with them. Sorry.

I used to work part time during my MSc days in the local ASDA (British Wal-Mart) in the stockroom. What I realised was that most British working class folks (Most were English but there were a few Scots as Scotland is not very far away from here) were quite smart and could handle modern mechanical and complex electronic devices needed on the job quite easily (I wonder if Indian working classes can do that as India modernises). A lot of them were just out of school but had no desire to study any further. They just did not have the drive, did not want to make the sacrifices and were earning quite well doing a blue collared job. I can guarantee you that a lot of them would have been decent engineers but were just not interested in studying engineering. One of them said he planned to learn plumbing as plumbers make a lot in Britain. He never thought of ever pursuing Engineering or Medicine. In one incident when I was in a youth hostel in Kent, a British truck driver beat my friends easy in chess several times. Both of those friends were Northern Brahmins and were quite good in chess (and the truck driver claimed he was just average as he was often beaten by other working class folks).

I wonder if high paying blue collared jobs combined with lack of status consciousness in European societies and a fall in discipline is robbing away a lot of high IQ Europeans from pursuing higher studies? Before leaving for Britain I had this belief that Whites were intellectually inferior to desis (South Asians) but my opinion has changed a lot after my stay here in England. They are probably smarter but they have no drive.

A lot of the supersmart indians (160 IQ plus) didnt have the patience/social skills to navigate the treacherous waters of academia. Even if they manage to finish the phd, in many cases they head for industry and rack up patents or kick back and allocate more attention to personal life and relationships or become independent (self owned business or startup).

I know one case of a fellow who got a big-name fellowship to Stanford for a PhD (his IQ is likely over 160; he got perfect scores 800/800/800 in the GRE of the mid 80s), did finish his Phd with a couple of papers... did not get along with his advisor and dropped out of academia and does his thing in industry.

I also know one mediocre student (only relatively speaking.. he is still definitely in the 140 IQ plus category) who by dint of social skills and hard work is now a member of the national academy. Many successful academics aren't necessarily super bright. they are experts in career management and know what is in fashion before it becomes fashionable.

My old room-mate came from a humble village background in one of the most backward states, married a white american.. felt unappreciated in his company where he slogged for over a decade, quit and now heads his own chip design firm. It would be hard to predict that trajectory when he was 18 (a full time job that would assure him a good bride was probably the optimistic scenario).

Nowadays I think top undergrad students from good Indian colleges are directly hired by the companies (so the obligate step of doing a US masters is skipped)

Typically, academics isnt that rewarding except for people who absolutely must have that lifestyle or are really passionate about their field. So chances of Indians being prominent in US academia aren't that high.

Keep in mind that Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences were minimal, with the exception of a few isolated giants (typically Sephardic) like Spinoza. Ashkenazis were insular and, while they made money, didn't contribute much at all to the general culture. Then from about the 1820s, great Ashkenazi artists and scientists appear in ever increasing numbers.

So, Indians might be like Ashkenazis in 1825. Or like gentile Russians, who made almost no cultural contribution at the high end of Western civilization, until after 1825.

Or, then again they might not be. Time will tell.

One thing is that Ashkenazi Jews were isolated from gentiles until after the mid 1800s. There were classical composers like Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer who were Jewish.

As for the Russians... Russia had only about 20 million people in the early 1800s and a very high birth rate. The proliferation of cultured Russians such as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff may be due quite simply to the fact that there were a lot more Russians in 1900 than in 1800!

debkumar:"Before leaving for Britain I had this belief that Whites were intellectually inferior to desis (South Asians) but my opinion has changed a lot after my stay here in England. They are probably smarter but they have no drive."

I can't describe your arguments anymore as even approximating scientific discussion, so I am going to stop after this message.

Regarding your last comment, let's say there are at least 40-60k IQ>160 individuals in India, which your model implies. This means just under 1k or so per cohort of graduating high school students at that level. IIT accepts 4k students a year. No one who is >>160 would have any fear of being denied admission since there are more seats than >160 students (even taking into account seats reserved for scheduled castes). That means the better IIT students will all be >>160 IQ. Since the US has only about 8k >160IQ individuals *of all ages*, the number of those in each of its annual cohorts is only around 100. So, once again I conclude that the largest component of the highest IQ group in US graduate schools (MS or PhD or professional schools) would be, year after year, coming from IIT as implied by your model. IIT just gives a lower bound. Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

From the discussion so far, it appears that there is agreement that the current mean Indian IQ is around 86 and that it is expected to increase to 92 in 2100, at which point point it will be around 10 points less than the chinese mean IQ.

The extent to which Chinese intellect dominates Asia depends strongly on the SD of the Chinese distribution. Is there a decent estimate of this number?

Second, there is considerable disagreement on the mean of the Indian subgroup (south indian brahmins). Is it 120 as rec1man posits or is it 110? It appears that 110 is a floor for this group.I think a good anchor would be to obtain SAT scores for this group and use that to estimate (after correcting for selection and environmental effects).. rec1man has done this in an indirect way to get 130 for the SIB diaspora but it would be more convincing to get these numbers directly.

Besides IQ, outcomes strongly depend on governance and infrastructure. The Indian system is based on electoral democracy which necessarily implies that the cognitive elites wont have any significant political power and will completely rely on other groups for letting them function/contribute. The prognosis is optimistic in that increasingly, the private sector of the economy is growing and meritocratic measures can be applied in job selection (unlike education where AA is on steroids and the quality of education tends to be substandard which wastes human resources).

--nsam

rec1man: The Tamil Nadu board exams is a test of memorization and apparently is specifically designed for non SIB groups to do well. that is, it has zero resolution at the higher end (which means it is utterly useless as a criteria for engg/medical college entrance which is what the politicians would want.. however there is a somewhat better measure(TNPCEE entrance exam) that is also a factor required also counts and restores some sanity to the process.

AA distorts the indian educational system a great deal and introduces horrendous inefficiencies (the recent move to add 27% OBC or peasant caste reservations in IITs being case in point). This basically implies that Indian universities will not be world class in this century (unlike the chinese who are investing a lot in this direction and dont need to deal with AA in any substantial way)

An unrelated point: Admission to medical colleges in India is far more insane than the IITs. The odds of getting in a top tier institution are so small that any rational person wouldn't invest the effort (unless they were privileged AA students).

Every year AIIMS accepts 45 Indian students, of which 33 belong to General Category and 11 belong to the reserved category (SC/ST) and 1 orthopedic physically handicapped, based on the results of an all-India entrance examination for its MBBS program. The number of students who take the entrance exam every year varies from 70,000 to 80,000. The acceptance rate for admission to the undergrad course (medical school) is thus 45/75000 i.e 0.06%.

Note that the AA here only applied to SC/ST group (the mean IQ of 80). There is tremendous pressure to have reservations for backward peasant castes (OBCs)and the director of the institute (a famed surgeon who happens to be a SIB) had to move the supreme court to oppose such quotas (probably these are inevitable in the end). The complete and utter idiocy of having quotas in ultra-elite institutions does not have any effect on politicians.

If elite institutions have to spend their energy and resources on dealing with increased numbers substandard quota students (at a scale thats not even imaginable in the USA.. where AA is well under control relatively speaking), theres every chance that they will continue to decline (unless privatization of education happens in a big way and institutes have liberty to select students.. much as in the private sector of the economy)

The model by rec1man can be improved :) The only thing right about it is that the Indian IQ distribution is multimodal.

Putting TamBrams at 120 in particular is inaccurate. TamBrams are smart, but 5 points smarter than the smartest group on earth (http://jinfo.org/) is unmoored from reality.

I thought about how to get estimates of Indian IQs the right way, and came up with the following.

1) spider a social networking site (e.g. Friendster, Facebook) which has Indian names and universities/education/work info. You can use Heritrix or Nutch or whatever to do this.

2) parse out the (first name, last name) and education/work info from each of your social network pages

3) derive a function which probabilistically maps from a given (first name, last name) pair to an estimated ethnicity.

It's easy to do this if you have a moderately sized training set of names along with manually assigned ethnic/caste labels.You can find this on the web or create it yourself, e.g. with 100 examples from each ethnic group that you want to work with.You simply featurize each name into a vector. You could get pretty far by using a vector with

a) the counts of each letterb) the counts of each 2-letter blockc) possibly other features based on knowledge of Indian names (e.g. n-letter blocks, syllables, etc.)

For example, names with many letters, the syllable "ma", and so on will have different frequencies among different ethnic groups.

Now you have a standard classification problem, where you're estimating the caste category from the name features.

Does that mean now, or when under a Brahmin-dominated government Indians chose socialism for themselves? Nehru was a Brahmin, and socialism must have appealed to him, or he would have chosen a different economic system.

In Nepal, the Brahmin mean IQ was 4 points higher, but not significant at a .05 alpha. (p 973)

Ogbu and Sterna cite studies showing that Ravens scores are fairly consistent across caste, though Vaishya (highest SES) score the highest. There are bigger gaps on verbal tests.

pg 16It seems reasonable that in a country with greater variance in environment, a larger fraction of the variance in verbal ability can be attributed to environment.

I suppose it is possible that Brahmins were strongly selected for verbal ability, but did brighter Brahmins actually have more children that survived to adulthood than dumber Brahmins? That's the crux of selection. In fact, it would be more logical that a relationship between intelligence and reproductive success would be highest in occupations where greater intelligence had the highest payoff in calories, fertile women, and reduced disease.

In Europe, that relationship was stronger in trade than in farming. So we should expect trading and merchant castes to have the highest verbal and mathematical ability.

The relationship for people in religious occupations is less clear. I don't know what historically caused differences in reproductive success among Brahmins. Was it status within the caste? Ability to manipulate the lower caste into giving them food and money?

Does that mean now, or when under a Brahmin-dominated government Indians chose socialism for themselves? Nehru was a Brahmin, and socialism must have appealed to him, or he would have chosen a different economic system.

Nehru was looking to destroy Hindu civilization and replace it with a new one. The civilizational aspect comes into play because Hinduism provides explicit sanction to the capitalist motive as being one of the four noble goals of life.

Gandhi was eager to prevent a breach between the rightists and the leftists. He thought the same could be prevented if Nehru became the Congress president, for that would satisfy the leftists; but as Nehru though radical in theory, was moderate in practice, his being president will really not hurt the rightists.

Page 89

Nehru said the world was divided into two vast camps; the imperialist and the fascist on the one side, and the socialist and the nationalist on the other....Capitalism in its difficulties, he claimed, took to fascism...

Page 89/90

Nehru realized that he was going a little beyond the usual beat of a Congress president in advocating socialism....It would mean ultimately a change in our instincts, habits and desires, in short, a new civilization.

BJP represents the interests of rapacious businessmen and feudal landlords. BJP opposes policies and legislation which help middle class,poor and oppressed groups to claim their rightful place in the country.

BJP represents the interests of rapacious businessmen and feudal landlords. BJP opposes policies and legislation which help middle class,poor and oppressed groups to claim their rightful place in the country.

Congress is a bad reincarnation of the National Socialist party. Bad because the national socialists at least educated the people.

Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

--

Let me explain the workings of the SIB techie mind

In the period, 1975-1995, the Indian economy was socialist with few job opportunitiesEngineering salaries in India were 5% of US salaries

The goal of everyone is to get out of India, Dubai, Singopore, Europe , wherever to make money for 5 years and retire rich by 30

At that time no western country recognised Indian degreesTo work abroad and earn big bucks it was necessary to get a foreign degree, MS

Nowadays intl companies recognise degrees from 1st and 2nd tier Indian colleges and directly hire locally in India and there is no need to get an MS or PhD from USANow, Engineering salaries in India are 20% of US levels and you can hire a chauffer, maid, gardener and live a very rich life in IndiaThats why very few Indians are going for MS these days

It so happens that US college professors were willing to give scholarships for Engineers with over 140IQ

So most engineers applied to US for post graduates studies and scholarships and mostly SIBs cracked the 140IQ in GRE and got scholarship

The SIB has no interest or love for the field of MSIt is simply a meal ticket

He has plenty of relatives that need financial support from him

The jewish guy is already rich by Indian standards and in no danger of starvationHe loves the field of study and wants Nobel etc

The SIB on the other hand has the attitude, how soon do I finish the MS and get a job

The smarter SIBs get a job in the US after 12-18 months of MSand his goal is achieved

The dumber SIBs who cant get a job after MS try to get into a PhD program anywhere he can get inHe may hate the field and he tries again in 3-4 years for a Industrial job, many go into industry after PhD at this time

The really dumb SIBs who cant get an industry job after both MS and PhD goes into post-doctoral and academia

As I said, the goal of the SIB is medicine, engineering and jobnot research and academia and nobels

Of course if given no other choice, he will do research in any field, since he has the IQ to handle it

The lowest quartile is a temple priestThe second quartile runs math tuition classes for the public, non-SIBThe 3rd quartile tries to go to US on ScholarshipThe 4th quartile has achieved job in silicon valley and is having a good time

The relationship for people in religious occupations is less clear. I don't know what historically caused differences in reproductive success among Brahmins. Was it status within the caste? Ability to manipulate the lower caste into giving them food and money?

--

Historically the brahmin was a shaman like the DruidHe invoked gods and nature spirits by using magical invocation in sanskrit

The invocation had to be pronounced right or it was ineffectiveThink Harry Potter

Many of these invocations also had to be repeated 108, 1008, 100008, 10000008 times and this number of repitions also needed to be accurate. Large number of chants had to be divided up accurately among hundreds of brahmins

Also by 1000BC, Sanskrit became a dead language so the brahmin had to be at least bilingual

And there was no phonetic script before 600BC, so the brahmin had to carry all the sanskrit chants in his head using oral transmission

The brahmin also had to predict eclipses

The brahmin also had to run village primary schools

In addition, many of the maharajas were illiterate and needed brahmin advisors ( think Merlin )

A brahmin who was a successful chanter of sanskrit and successful predictor or eclipses, and successful primary school teacher would have a steady job and get 2-3 wives

The brahmin who could not do the above, got no wife at all and went extinct

So what is the IQ of the PatelIs it 100, white meanIs it 105 ( chinese Avg )Is it 95 ( blue collar white )

IQ and academic tests in UK only give the score of the combined blend of 60% patel northern merchants and 40% jat sikh northern peasantsThe jat sikh is a blue collar middle class high school complete--

Next level up is the southern merchant - ChettiarFound in Singapore

The Indian diaspora in Singapore, 50% Southern Merchant, 25% Southern Dalit, and 25% southern peasant , academically in math performs midway between the 108IQ chinese and 92IQ malayand in english, they beat both the chinese and the malays

Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

--

No SIB will come unless he gets scholarship and a stipend

So this influx is limited by how many TA / RA are given out by US college professors

Dumber brahmins and merchants will have no children at all and die out

Do you have a cite for that?

I don't know a thing about the current reproductive structure in India, but this was a question about the past. I don't know what Brahmins did to earn a living in the past, or if success translated into increased number of children.

It is not immediately obvious that religious occupations demand tremendous intelligence, or if intelligence, or that religious occupations have high IQ elasticity.

Cochran and Harpending say "To theextent that status and wealth were inherited rather than earned, the correlation between cognitive traits and reproductive success in elite groups may have been quiteweak." Inherited, sounds like castes.

You also haven't touched that on more pure measures of g, like Ravens, there are small caste differences, and they don't favor Brahmins.

Also, having been strongly selected for IQ, we should see some sign of that. Is myopia especially common in Brahmins? Any recessive genetic disorders affecting the brain?

Uhh.. let me get this straight. The smartest brahmins -- who are smarter than the mediocre Nobel prize winners here in the US -- are all working for $5k a year doing mindless code work for outsourcers? They're not in silicon valley, they're not professors at Harvard or MIT, they're not running hedge funds and they're not the founders of startups like hotmail? Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools, if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...

rec1man here---Dumber brahmins and merchants will have no children at all and die out

Do you have a cite for that?

I don't know a thing about the current reproductive structure in India, but this was a question about the past. I don't know what Brahmins did to earn a living in the past, or if success translated into increased number of children.

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For the last 3000 years, there is no such thing as love marraigeIt is all arranged marraige

Even now, 20 miles from Delhi, if you try to do a love marraige the girls father will lynch you

So for 3000 years for all castes, no decent job = no wife

The definition of decent job of course varies with caste level

For an untouchable, decent job could mean flourishing leather business

For a peasant it could mean, owning a large farm

For a merchant it could mean wealth

For a brahmin it could mean job as a teacher or a priest or some other white collar job

myopia is common among SIBs (as well as other brahmin groups) although I have no idea how it compares with other indian caste groups.

It is also possible (no hard evidence) that certain types of mental illness among males may be above average (schizophrenia perhaps which isnt as neatly defined as myopia)

http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/new/detail.asp?id=1411

also note that in past generations mortality of females at child birth was astoundingly high.. So it was fairly common for successful SIBs to have multiple, serial marriages and spawn quite a few kids (besides concurrent polygamy). all this doesnt exist these days. sexual selection was completely rational (totally hinged ability of male as provider)

here is a guy who is the tenth child of an SIB (currently, I guess the average SIB family has 2 to 3 kids)

Uhh.. let me get this straight. The smartest brahmins -- who are smarter than the mediocre Nobel prize winners here in the US -- are all working for $5k a year doing mindless code work for outsourcers? They're not in silicon valley, they're not professors at Harvard or MIT, they're not running hedge funds and they're not the founders of startups like hotmail? Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools, if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...--

SIBs , the top end of the code writers for Outsources currently earn $20K in India

Given PPP, it works out to 120K in the USIt is a perfectly rational decision to avoid 6 years of doing PhD and end up as a post-doc getting 35k and trying for a Nobel

Also when Citi went bust they called in a SIB, Vikram Pandit,they needed the best, not someone from the old boy network

--

The smartest SIBs used to be in silicon valley until 2000, after that, since the Indian economy boomed, based on PPP, they can get 100k equivalent salaries while staying in India without the need for a US degree, so why bother with a US degree

Infosys, Congizant and so on have plenty of SIB millionaires who never got a US degree

--

SIBs lack business skills only recently have they been starting software companiesHot mail was started by Sabeer Bhatia a northern merchant

--

Regarding Professorships

Being a Professor for SIB ranks below Doctor, Engineer all of which pay over 100kWhereas an Assistant Professor by 35 is only making 50kso only those SIBs who cant make it as doctors or engineers will go into professorships

--

Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools,---

SIBs cannot afford to pay for US degrees unless they get a full scholarship, full tuition and stipend

----

if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...

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keep thinking that way as the SIBs and other upper castes suck up most white collar jobs in the west through the internet

10 years ago, outsourcing was unknown, 10 years from now, very few jobs will be non-outsourced

Typically, academics isnt that rewarding except for people who absolutely must have that lifestyle or are really passionate about their field. So chances of Indians being prominent in US academia aren't that high.

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Absolutely, only when a SIB cant get a job as a doctor or engineer will he turn to academiaVery few SIBs are passionate about any field, except as a meal ticket

nsam wrote--Second, there is considerable disagreement on the mean of the Indian subgroup (south indian brahmins). Is it 120 as rec1man posits or is it 110? It appears that 110 is a floor for this group.--

The big controversy is not about the absolute number for the IQ but for the fact it seems to overlap the Ashkenazi range--

Lets do a sanity check in Singapore

In Singapore, the Avg Chinese is 108Does it make sense for the SIB to be as low as 110 ( after Flynn improvement ), to virtually overlap with the Average ChineseMedian

Next in Singapore the Malay IQ is 92

In math, the Indian diaspora is midway between the chinese and Malay with a 100IQ for math

In English, the Indian diaspora beats both the chinese and the malays giving a verbal IQ above both

Even taking the lower number of 100IQ for the non-filtered diaspora in Singapore

Takahata Joe also concurs with a 100IQ for the Singapore Indian Diaspora

This is from a diaspora that consists of 25% southern Dalit 85IQ and 25% southern peasant, 100IQ and 50% southern merchant

Another sanity check, if the SIB number is 110 after Flynn improvements, it is only 2 points above southern merchantand does this 2IQ delta make sense given what we all know about all India entrance exams

There is a myth floating in this thread that "exceptionally" high IQs are needed to do well in academia and contribute to science/engg.

This is likely true for a few disciplines like pure math and pure physics. For the rest (i.e. more than 90% of science and engg) the threshold IQ is much lower and there are thousands of people who could have contributed but chose to give Science a miss.

I dont recall the source but I recall it was a study done on bell lab scientists and given the threshold IQ (probably 140) restricted the range, what mattered for outcomes were other factors (skills in communication etc). And of course a passion for the subject, which probably matters most. Here is where environmental and cultural factors play a big part.

So it is likely that SIBs performance on SATs and the like is superior to all other largish groups in the US (including Jews); recall that they are only number 200,000 or fewer. At the same time, its possible their energies are focused in areas that are not as likely to lead to lasting contributions in science (professional engineer or doctor for example).

The two measures (IQ and contributions to science) are separable. Its also likely that the SD within SIB is smaller than the 15 points in the general population (It would be very surprising if it was higher than 10); That could also account for the purported absence of outliers.

The big uncertainty involves projecting back to the Indian SIBs as its hard to tell how self selected these USA SIBs are. If the USA SIBs are 2 SDs above the Indian SIB mean and they have a mean IQ of 130 and the SD within the SIB group was 10, then the mean current Indian SIB is 110 which seems pretty conservative (but plausible, given environmental differences). So my conservative estimate for mean current Indian SIB (by the way this is a much larger group than Tamil Brahmins as it includes folks from the other southern provinces and totals, as per rec1man, 11 million) is 110 with an SD of 10.

note: The difference between IQ means does not have the same meaning within groups, as it does for the general population because the SDs within groups are expected to be less than 15.

An equally or more interesting issue (which hasnt attracted much attention in this thread) is the IQ of the merchant and peasant castes as they are far more numerous and drive the growth of the economy. I find it hard to believe the north-south difference for the merchants and peasants but if, in fact, there is a main effect of geography (north vs. south) that applies to many caste groups that would certainly be a non-intuitive/unexpected finding.

nsam said:"There is a myth floating in this thread that "exceptionally" high IQs are needed to do well in academia and contribute to science/engg.

This is likely true for a few disciplines like pure math and pure physics."

If recman's claims were correct about 40k IQ>160 Brahmins in India (vs. only 8k in the entire US), wouldn't you agree that they would necessarily dominate these disciplines? Whereas, in reality they do not. That makes me think recman is nuts. (In science, this is called comparing model to data. In this case the model fails.)

Recman tried to weasel out by claiming that the bulk of the 40k IQ>160 geniuses are happy to do outsourced low level coding for $5k per year. Totally implausible, and disagrees with observations that the depth of technical talent in India is fairly shallow -- companies are having a hard time now finding good people (well documented in the IT business press). His latest response is to mention a handful of Indian geniuses -- fewer Nobelists than Switzerland has produced -- as evidence for 5x as many geniuses in India today as in the US.

rob said---The role of a brahmin is not just priest, it is also shaman, able to invoke spirits with accurate chants

But magic is pretend, so it doesn't matter if they got the chants right. If shamanistic traditions created selection pressure for IQ, virtually every primitive people would be smart: they aren't.

The same applies to arranged marriage: many cultures have it, and it didn't make them smart.

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For believers, magic is not pretendEven now 90% of Indian believe in astrology

A shaman is typically smarter than the rest of his tribe

In other religions such as Egypt, the shaman evolved into a priest interested in building large monumentsWhereas the brahmin evolved into a precision shaman precision in chanting, precision in invocations, precision in predicting eclipses and the seasons, and precision in numbers

--

All cultures used to have arranged marraiges, The successful generalist got wives

With the caste system forcing occupational niches, in each caste, men who were the best fit for the ecological niches in the caste occupations got wives

In the case of the brahmin, advanced literacy was the skill that gave him a job, and wives

Here is an article on high end wall street jobs being outsourced to upper castes in India

Except for the top quartile, thanks to the internet, virtually every white collar back office job will go to India

It wont go to the Philipines, since they have 90IQ and it wont go to china, because even in Singapore, the Mediocre Indian diaspora outscores the chinese in English and the chinese in Singapore are exposed to English for 100 years

By Yalman OnaranJune 5 (Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. had no analysts in India four years ago. Now, the third-largest U.S. bank has 80, including Naresh Bilandani, a 26-year-old London School of Economics graduate hired last year in Mumbai to help provide clients with investment recommendations on European lenders.

The group accounts for 14 percent of New York-based JPMorgan's research staff and illustrates a growing trend. Niket Patankar, who sells research services to investment banks in less-expensive markets, estimates that India's analyst ranks swelled to 5,700 from 300 in 2002. Merrill Lynch & Co., the second-largest U.S. securities firm by market value, and No. 3 Morgan Stanley employ more than 50 of them.

Securities firms are leaning on India's expanding pool of financial talent for number-crunching so they can afford to keep franchise analysts in New York and London. Wall Street's 2003 settlement with U.S. regulators cut off research departments from the revenue they got for helping investment bankers bring in fees. Now institutional customers such as Fidelity Investments are refusing to pay the inflated trading commissions that subsidized analyst reports for decades.

``We got outsourced,'' said Tom Larsen, who lost his job in London covering U.K. companies when Credit Suisse Group moved five of the seven analyst jobs in his group to India. ``Wall Street is aware that the old model, financed by investment banking, doesn't work any more. So it's trying different new models, including outsourcing.''

Larsen, 45, is now a senior policy analyst at the CFA Institute, the Charlottesville, Virginia-based organization that gives the required Chartered Financial Analyst designation to candidates who pass a grueling three-level set of once-a-year, half-day exams on everything from research ethics to discounted cash flow modeling.

CFA Exams

The number of people taking CFA tests in India climbed fivefold since 2002 to 3,178 this year, according to the CFA Institute. U.S. candidates fell by about 25 percent to 30,384. Patankar, co-founder of New York-based Adventity Inc., predicts India will have more than 20,000 analysts in 2011. That would put it ahead of the 15,229 securities analysts working at brokerages and investment banks in the U.S., according to Thomson Financial, a New York-based firm that tracks Wall Street research. The U.K. has 1,228 analysts.

``Research is probably the easiest investment-banking service that can be duplicated in India, where people are just as smart and educated as here,'' said Nejat Seyhun, a professor of finance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ``Technology has reduced the need for physical presence.''

The trend mirrors past shifts in industries from computers to automobiles, where companies from Dell Inc. to Ford Motor Co. moved production to low-cost centers such as Malaysia and Vietnam.

3,218 Miles Away

JPMorgan is keeping more-experienced analysts such as Michael Weinstein, ranked No. 1 in Institutional Investor's annual poll for his coverage of medical supply and device companies. Weinstein, based in New York, works less than an hour's drive from the biggest company in that industry, New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson.

Bilandini's Mumbai office is 3,218 miles from the headquarters of Athens-based National Bank of Greece, one of the companies that he tracks for JPMorgan.

Investment banks are ``salami-slicing their research activities and separating what needs to be at high-cost centers like New York from what doesn't,'' said Chris Gentle, director of financial-services research at Deloitte Services LP in London.``Pressure to move offshore will grow as investment banks look for ways to cut costs while their budgets are squeezed.''

High-Cost Centers

Wall Street's research spending fell about 35 percent from 2001 to 2005, estimates Brad Hintz, a New York-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who tracks the securities industry. Hintz's own firm relies mainly on bundling, or billing clients for research and trade execution in a single commission, for the revenue it needs to compensate analysts.

Total commissions paid for trading U.S. stocks dropped to $11.3 billion in 2005 from $13.4 billion in 2002, according to a survey of 239 fund managers by industry consultants at Greenwich Associates in Greenwich, Connecticut. The proportion allocated to research stayed constant at 40 percent, the survey found.

That decline made it impossible for the securities industry to maintain the same research staff in high-cost centers. The number of analysts working for the 10 biggest firms declined 21 percent to 2,641 as of November from 3,364 in 2001, according to Thomson figures.

India is helping to reverse the trend. Analysts in cities like Mumbai make as little as $20,000 a year, according to Absolute Return, a hedge fund newsletter. That compares with an average of $181,000 in the U.S. in 2005, a survey by the CFA Institute found.

Using these numbers, the very high IQ population in India is similar to that of the US, perhaps a 2x larger. Entirely plausible, and it is likely to improve with better nutrition, access to education, etc.

Debkumar Guha said--The same with the International Olympiad in Informaticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics

Virtually all the winners are Europeans and Chinese. No Tam Brahmin and a lot of Slavonic and Baltic names. Will Bangalore be out-programmed by Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the future?

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Let me offer my explanation

The Ravens matrix test assumes that the testee is normal and has equal verbal and math skills

The Ravens Matrix test is visuo-spacial and east asians do very well here

So let us grant that east asians can write code that maybe runs 10% faster than SIBs

Software is a lot more than speed of code. It has to do with meeting customer requirements and understanding nuances of the specifications. Utter fluency in english, not basic literacy, is required and very many SIBs can beat most native speakers of english in english in understanding nuances

In the Ravens matrices, East Asians can score at 108and this carries over into pure mathematics

As we move into applied mathematicsthe picture changesVerbal skills are also required, such as which equation to use in any given context

In Singapore, in english, the mediocre Indian diaspora beats the 108IQ chinese

--

Just as the east asians have a verbal deficit, IMHO, Indians have a verbal advantage, which is not measured in the Ravens matricesMost Indians are bilingualTens of millions are tri-lingualand can skip from script to script as they move in India

--

I purchased a copy of Lilavati by the Indian mathematician Bhaskara( 1100AD )

It was the basic math text in india, until the british changed the curriculum

This book covers all the math knowledge upto Newton

I have seen western math text books in college which just give equations

Lilavati on the other hand teaches every math concept in the form of a short story and instead of dry stuff like x, y, zuses variables as elephants, umbrellas, monkeys etc

The method is purely applied math and not pure math, and in applied math, such as software, I believe that Indians have an edge

Panini the sanskrit grammarian discovered concepts in 500BC( look Panini up in wiki )that set the foundations of computer languages and their syntax and their constraints

"Attacks on the competence of Indian lawyers and law graduates are about as valid as saying that Indian software engineers are incapable of handling sophisticated IT (information technology) work. To the contrary, the Indian IT industry is a world leader, and the same will be the case with offshored legal services."

…at least in the US, law graduates for the most part are notoriously incapable of writing effectively in English. The problem is so severe that some large US law firms now assign a writing coach to each incoming associate.

"Every sector of the legal offshoring industry will grow dramatically, including lower end services, such as document coding and legal transcription. Ultimately, however, the biggest impact, the long-term mother lode, will be higher-value services such as legal research and drafting – services that constitute the bulk of the legal work now done in the West."

anon--If recman's claims were correct about 40k IQ>160 Brahmins in India (vs. only 8k in the entire US), wouldn't you agree that they would necessarily dominate these disciplines?--

rec1man has since put current Indian SIB mean at 113. Note that the SD is likely much less than 15 for SIB, due to restriction by range. All this reduces the > 160 numbers quite a lot, definitely far less than 8 k. My estimate would probably be anywhere in the 1000 to 4000 range (over all groups) in India. And the corresponding number for the Indian diaspora in the US would probably be at least 1000. I dont think its wise to use gaussian statistics to estimate the far tail (see reference at the end)and only actual research can establish the fat tails for various groups.

Second, hardly anyone from the really talented set studies math or physics at advanced levels in India. Yes, there are a few but most of the really smart people do stuff for safe bucks (engg, medicine or business). On this rec1man is absolutely right. Lets say per year there are 50 of these people. Maybe 2 or 3 may opt for pure physics or pure math. Quite a few of these will eventually find their way into good US univs as faculty. Its a small number (maybe much less than 100 total in decent US math and physics departments and maybe many of these are american born as they have more freedom, I am guessing; applied sciences, engg, medicine, and business is a completely different matter, there are plenty of indians and they can find niches to dominate).

Once the living standards go up in a couple of generations, hopefully students will have more freedom to shape their careers without wasting it on entrance exam preparation and the like.

---

Someone could pursue a Cochran et al type investigation into South Indian Brahmins (or a subgroup such as Tamil Brahmins). Payoff seems quite likely (i.e a publishable paper).

You will note that the famous untutored Ramanujan (SIB) of the early 20th century was rated as a mathematician of the very highest class by GH Hardy. This was in a different era and Ramanujan was poor, malnourished and died early. Its not unlikely that these outliers appear now and then; one sees cases like the girl who maxed out the SATs at age 12 and the kid who won the geo bee this year (both SIBs) at 11 years.

I have noted high incidence of myopia and possibly high incidence of schizophrenia as well among SIBs. Add to this disorders like Autism or Aspergers (the extreme male brain as per Simon Baron Cohen). A nephew of mine memorized the entire railway time table as a child (he is a high functioning Aspergers) and another made plans for an elaborate imagined city over hundreds of drawing sheets (this kid is otherwise normal but one can see a hint of some special quality).

There are plenty (millions) of poor Brahmins all over India (especially in North India) and these groups face a double whammy of poverty and AA. Would be Philanthropists would get their best bang for the buck by targeting such groups.

There have been two nobel prize winners from India (C.V. Raman and S. Chandrahekar) and both have been Tamil Brahmins of whom there are about 4 million world wide. The great 20th century mathematician Ramanujan was also a Tamil Brahmin as is the current second ranked chess grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand.

The per-capita production of physics Nobel prize winners, top-rate mathematicians and chess grandmasters by Tamil Brahmins is still considerably smaller than that by the Ashkenazim.

I propose that the average IQ of "pure" Ashenazim is greater than 115. With the reduction of anti-semitism and the increased secularization among Jews, many Jews have taken to marrying non-Jews. If the American Ashkenazim have a 50% European admixture, than the average IQ of "pure" Ashkenazim might be 130.

Correction:There have been two nobel prize winners from India in Science who are SIB.You forget the Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen (Bengali Kayastha)for Economics and Hargobind Khorana for Medicine (Punjabi). (I am ready to ignore Rabindranath Tagore for Literature who was a Bengali Brahmin and V.S Naipaul for Literature who was Northern Brahmin. I am also ignoring Mother Teresa for Peace as she was ethnically Serb and Rudyard Kipling for literature as he was ethnically Englishman). As far as South Asia is concerned you forget Abdus Salam for Physics who is a Pakistani Ahmadiya Punjabi and Mohhamed Yunnus for Peace who is Bengali from Bangladesh.

Anyways the number of Nobel prize winners for India is very low on a per capita probability basis. I remember that table for Nobel prize winners per thousand population with Iceland on top and India was near the bottom.

Am I the only one who thinks the entire Indian IQ debate on this post is wish-fulfillment by a clique of innumerate Hindu chauvinists (the self-pitying whining about a thousand years of muslim followed by subsequent English domination is the first clue)?

Two immediate points of contention spring to mind immediately. First the IQ of Indian Singaporeans.

Rec1man attributes this as 104. Simply on the basis that the Indians score between the Chinese and Malays. I cannot fathom how no one else has contested this mathematical idiocy.

Based on his own scores that Rec1man provided, the breakdown is as follows.

2006 English scoreChinese = 97.9Indian = 98.3Malay = 94.9

2006 Math ScoreChinese = 90.3Indian = 74.7Malay = 58.9

Even assuming a linear relationship between test scores and IQ exists (which it doesn't) the gap between Indian-Chinese math scores is far more significant than the difference in English scores. Since there is no clear formulaic relationship, even simply assigning proportional weighting to the actual test scores yields an Indian IQ of 99.27. This is of course a flawed calculation in and of itself because it makes assumptions of correlations that do not exist, but its better than the 2nd grade math that the Indians use.

Secondly, historical projections of GDP are at best guesstimates, considering two major limitations. The territorial notions of what we consider today India are not that of India at 1CE. Also even population estimates for so long ago are prone to a wide degree of divergence. If Rec1man had actually bothered to read Maddison's work, he would have realized that per capita GDP in the world up until around 1500 was remarkably consistent with only a divergence of a few percentage points. A given considering that all of humanity toiled under the agricultural whip. Thus India's GDP as historically noted should factor in the population of the Indian subcontinent (a geo-climactic feature and not a social one) rather than any notions of Indian genius.

It had become apparent to them that not every typist and copyist working the midnight shift in their investment banks - the moonlighting actor, the artist with the ring in his nose - as putting his heart, soul, and syntactical memory into completing the PowerPoint presentations that needed to be done, perfectly, by morning. Randy began to speculate that workers overseas might invest more care in the menial jobs that Manhattanites seemed not to relish. Joe, who had been introduced to Madras on a family vacation when he was twelve, thought that some of its underemployed citizens might be grateful indeed. ‘You met people in factories or running the elevator who had the intelligence and spirit to do so much more,’ he remembered. ‘We thought, why not release that talent?’

During the mutual-reassurance sessions common to foundering enterprises, Joe and Randy got to know their employees better than they ordinarily might have. All were college educated. A third possessed postgraduate or doctoral degrees. Randy returned to New York to establish the American side of the business and, from a small office overlooking a DunkinDonuts, pressed his former Wall Street colleagues to give the Indian workers a trial run at higher-end labor.

Soon after, during a fast-turnaround project, Joe offended his staff by waving rupee notes – incentive - in front of their noses. He has given up trying to reprogram the hotel coffee-shop pianist, who, having realized that Joe is perhaps the only Jew in Chennai, routinely serenades him with ‘Hava Nagila’ when he sits down to lunch,

One false assumption had been that only the manufacture of goods, not the provision of services, could be exported. Another, supported most recently by the U.S. Department of Labor, is that the number of American jobs lost to outsourcing is minuscule. But Labor statisticians rely on the corporations to link their domestic downsizing to work they now send abroad - a connection that some corporate leaders are loath to make. Other analyses suggest that the number of American jobs lost to this phenomenon will soon reach a million,

Indian analysts foresee outsourcing in biotech research, pharmaceuticals, architecture, and the law. Although many economists believe that this global transition is mutually beneficial - that an economy is better off specializing in areas where it is relatively more productive and importing in areas where it is not - a study by the University of California at Berkeley identifies fourteen million American jobs at risk in the near term. The latest consolation is that, since many outsourced jobs are low-end and mechanistic, Americans are now being liberated to use their exceptional skills as innovators and entrepreneurs. Being tactful, the Tigers pretend to agree. What is the advantage of pointing out that the country of Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen may not, in fact, be creatively impaired? The resumes and credit-repair leaflets spewing into the copy shop from Texas are less diplomatic. They intimate that some Americans have been ‘freed up’ to do nothing productive whatsoever.

An Office Tiger manager concluded a phone call that required an American accent and began to help one of his document specialists decipher a five-page scrawled submission. ‘The supervisor called plaintiff gay, child molester, pedophile, and other malicious things’ he slowly made out the words. ‘Pedophile’ misspelled here, - the typist noted quietly, in order not to disturb the concentration of her colleagues. ‘It’s not ‘p-h-e-d-o’.

‘And he obviously didn’d mean to write ‘viscous,’ the manager said. ‘It should be ‘The vicious rumors that were spread’

Upon consideration, the students will argue that, since America is globalization’s great hegemon, it’s an advantage to work for Americans directly, instead of for Indian-owned companies like Infosys or Wipro, where U.S. work is also done.

After three years at Office Tiger, Harish is still occasionally jarred by dislocation. When Wall Streeters call and say, ‘Hey, Harry, what’s up?’ - as they do, often - the wrong picture always pops into his mind. What’s up is a rotating metal fan on the low Styrofoam ceiling of the room where he sleeps, on the floor, beside his father, mother, brother, and grandmother

The neighborhood where Harish has lived all his life is named Triplicane, and was once an ancient fishermen’s village. It is today so densely populated that some travel guides mistake it for a slum.

The family was of the education-revering Brahmin caste, but the parents were too poor for the mother to fulfill her expected role of staying home and tutoring Harish and his younger brother and sister. She worked instead as a clerk in a government office, her intelligence never rewarded. Her husband worked across town, in another government office,

There was a programming job that outside contractors had said they’d need three months to complete. Harish did it on his own in sixty hours. ‘It was just intuitive, a three-day stunt,’ he said, modestly. ‘I have no big theories, but some problems I can solve from the bottom up.’ Such efficiency-minded innovation was a Tiger trademark, and helped explain why, over five years, only a single American company had, after a trial run at Office Tiger, opted out.

Today, at private corporations like Office Tiger, the official stance on caste is ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ This scruple excuses executives from acknowledging what impolite inquiry makes clear: Brahmin and other upper castes dominate the supervisory class, while untouchables still clean toilets. They’re lucky to have jobs at all.

anon said--Based on his own scores that Rec1man provided, the breakdown is as follows.

2006 English scoreChinese = 97.9Indian = 98.3Malay = 94.9

2006 Math ScoreChinese = 90.3Indian = 74.7Malay = 58.9

Even assuming a linear relationship between test scores and IQ exists (which it doesn't) the gap between Indian-Chinese math scores is far more significant than the difference in English scores. Since there is no clear formulaic relationship, even simply assigning proportional weighting to the actual test scores yields an Indian IQ of 99.27.--

The above method yielded IQ ofSouthern Merchant at 115

Yesterday, I posted an updated model, which seems to have found consensus

The higher castes have been moved down by 7IQSo southern Merchant is now 108in Singapore and 105 in India

What I found interesting was that even though the IIT’s performed badly in those programming contests Debkumar showed, the IIT from Madras performed better than the one from Bombay.http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2007/Finals/Results-2007/standings-2007.htmhttp://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2005/Finals/Standings.html How is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).

How is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).--

There is an all india entrance screen for IITs

Each IIT offers a set of Engineering Degrees in many fields

The way it works is that the top rankers have first choice of location and field of engineering

As we go down the list, the most popular locations and courses get filled up and the guy who cant make it to what he wants, then moves onto his second choice and so on and as the second choice gets filled up, to the 3rd choice and so on

Thanks to 70% AA, now 70% of Tamil Brahmins are now outside Tamil Nadu

The Tamil Brahmin who lives in Chennai would probably opt for the IIT in Chennai and the Tam Brahmin who lives in Mumbai would probably opt for the IIT in Mumbai

What I found interesting was that even though the IIT’s performed badly in those programming contests Debkumar showed, the IIT from Madras performed better than the one from Bombay.http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2007/Finals/Results-2007/standings-2007.htmhttp://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2005/Finals/Standings.htmlHow is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).

--

Tamil Brahmins who get into IIT would be more likely to opt for Chennai, where 90% of the IIT faculty is SIB

Whereas Maharashtrian brahmins would be more likely to opt for IIT Mumbai

However, Tam brahmins who cant get their choice of field in Chennai would choose IIT mumbai if their field has open slots in Mumbai

you are right..due to a variety of factors, SIBs are to be found in relatively greater numbers in chennai (although they are to be found in other places as well)

http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/acm/

indicates southern institutes fare better

However I dont think this type of competition should be taken too seriously however; it is well known that IIT Kanpur has the best rep in CS education (in India) since the 70s. I guess the best computer scientists are not necessarily the best hackers or they dont care enough for such competitions. Similarly in the overall competition, if Stanford and Harvard arent at the top, I wouldnt conclude that they dont have talented software people. Hacking doesnt need any formal education AFAIK.

The SIBs are absent in the Maths Olympiads as well.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Olympiadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_exceptional_participants

Among the high scoring participants we have 4 Germans, 5 Romanian/ Moldovans, 4 Hungarians, 6 Russians, 1 Chinese from the U.S.A, 2 Britons, 4 Bulgarians, 1 Ukrainian, 1 Japanese and 1 Ashkenazi who migrated from Russia to the U.S.A (There could be more Ashkenazis among the above). Check out the photo on the first wikipedia page of those four perfect scoreres. Two anglos and two E. Asians. No SIBs!

the indian segment of the contest for 2008 was won by a team from a second tier college (NIT trichy.. apologies for labeling it as such.. perhaps it deserves to be better known) and all 4 participants in the winning team were SIBs (tamil brahmins)

There is a lot of training required to do well on the Olympiads (math or informatics), so a lack of Indians doesn't necessarily mean anything (unless they *do* have a well-organized national program but still don't perform well). That is why you see some less famous schools or smaller countries doing very well. Note the Hungarians, Romanians and other eastern Europeans have a strong tradition in academic competitions.

Among the exceptional math competitors should be listed many from the PRC -- their team typically wins 3-5 golds each year -- but probably the individuals are unknown in the west.

1. In 1760, contact with the west happened due to colonialism, and while it is easy to justify colonising low IQ people like africans, it is hard to justify it in a place where 20% is above white IQ, hence suppressing news about upper caste Indian IQ made sense from a colonialist projectIn 1780, Sir William Jones discovered the common Indo-european roots for Sanskrit and English and Indian upper caste IQ got a good press for a few decadesBut after 1830, the good press vanished

2. Since 1500, the Xtian church has been trying to convert hindus.The Xtian church has been the main source of information / misinformation / slander about India to the western publicWhile the western public may give a lot of money to convert a primitive tribe, it is hard to get funding if 20% of the target is higher IQ than whites

3. Within India, in its conversion campaigns, the xtian church has targeted the brahmins and maligned the brahmins in their publications and it is hard to do it against an acknowledged higher IQ opponent

4. Unlike East Asian women, who will do anything to marry a white man. I have seen rich chinese girls marry white truck drivers, and other blue collar people, Upper caste women are not accessible to outsiders and the average american is less familiar with Indians. The mixed breed Anglo-Indians were the product of Dalit women and the british

5. There is a lot of church prejudice against upper caste Indians, because unlike East Asians, who have converted by the hundreds of millions to xtianity,there is almost zero conversion among the upper castes and given that the church is the information gateway to the white public, they would definitely suppress the news about high IQ among upper castes

6. Overall Indian poverty until 20 years ago and it is hard to imagine that 20% are above white IQThe economic reforms liberated the merchant caste, AA still cripples the brahmins

7. In the US, blacks are lower IQ than whites and it is hard for white americans to understand that the darker south Indian brahmins are the top of the IQ pile in India and very near Ashkenazi levels and that in the US, the dark SIB diaspora is 10 points above the AshkenaziIn India, northern Dalits are fairer than SIB

8. SIBs are a publicity shy community and the only time the US public sees them is in the spelling and geographic beesSIBs have been in the US for 30 years in very large numbers and their IQ is hidden by so called 'Indian' achievements in SAT and other awardsThe H1-B Indian engineers ( mostly non-SIB ) are getting a free ride based on the glowing reputation of the F1-Scholarship SIBs in silicon valley

"The mixed breed Anglo-Indians were the product of Dalit women and the british"

Are you sure? I find it hard to believe the Brits would find Dalits attractive for marriage even though most of those Brits who intermarried after the mutiny were lower class soldiers. Half breed were looked down upon by the offer class British. I would think more on the lines of Merchant classes or Muslims. I had met an old woman in a church once whose mother was a Bihari/UP Brahmin and father was English. If I am not mistaken her mother had to run away with her father to England due to caste restrictions and the English were not very favourable to the marriage as well. Her only son was married to a British Gujrati. William Dalrymple's book 'White Mughals' gives a good idea about this.

AIs are probably the offspring of british men to lower caste (not dalit) women, IMO. Its interesting that Anglo indians themselves became an Indian caste. I am not sure how accurate the report below is regarding migration; I thought that virtually all anglo indians are now in uk/aus/canada. I was familiar with a few AIs (note that many of the AIs are indistinguishable in skin tone from many Indians while others are very light skinned) and in general they were good at sports (particularly field hockey) but not very interested in academics.

Anglo-Indians in India

The largest group of European Indians, however, are descendants of British men, generally from the colonial service and the military, and lower-caste Hindu or Muslim women. From some time in the nineteenth century, both the British and the Indian societies rejected the offspring of these unions, and so the Anglo-Indians, as they became known, sought marriage partners among other Anglo Indians. Over time this group developed a number of caste-like features and acquired a special occupational niche in the railroad, postal, and customs services. A number of factors fostered a strong sense of community among Anglo-Indians. The school system focused on English language and culture and was virtually segregated, as were Anglo-Indian social clubs; the group's adherence to Christianity also set members apart from most other Indians; and distinctive manners, diet, dress, and speech contributed to their segregation.

During the independence movement, many Anglo-Indians identified (or were assumed to identify) with British rule, and, therefore, incurred the distrust and hostility of Indian nationalists. Their position at independence was difficult. They felt a loyalty to a British "home" that most had never seen and where they would gain little social acceptance. They felt insecure in an India that put a premium on participation in the independence movement as a prerequisite for important government positions.

Some Anglo-Indians left the country in 1947, hoping to make a new life in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia or Canada. Many of these people returned to India after unsuccessful attempts to find a place in "alien" societies. Most Anglo-Indians, however, opted to stay in India and made whatever adjustments they deemed necessary.

Like the Parsis, the Anglo-Indians are essentially urban dwellers. Unlike the Parsis, relatively few have attained high levels of education, amassed great wealth, or achieved more than subordinate government positions. In the 1990s, Anglo-Indians remained scattered throughout the country in the larger cities and those smaller towns serving as railroad junctions and communications centers.

Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities permit Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. In order to encourage the integration of the community into the larger society, the government stipulates that a certain percentage of the student body come from other Indian communities. There is no evident official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment. A few have risen to high posts; some are high-ranking officers in the military, and a few are judges. In occupational terms, at least, the assimilation of Anglo-Indians into the mainstream of Indian life was well under way by the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the group will probably remain socially distinct as long as its members marry only other Anglo-Indians and its European descent continues to be noted.

Africans

Still another foreign-origin group, usually known collectively as Siddhis, are the descendants of Africans brought to India as slaves. Although most African-origin Indians are descendants of the large influx of slaves brought to western India in the seventeenth century, the first Africans reportedly arrived on the Konkani Coast in the first century A.D. as a result of the Arab slave trade, and there was an important African presence, including several short-term rulers, in Bengal in the fifteenth century. Siddhis (the name means lord or prince in African usage) sometimes rose to prominent--even ruling--governmental and military positions during the Mughal and British periods.

Most modern-day Siddhis are Muslims and are engaged in agricultural pursuits. They are found in Gujarat, Daman and Diu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and other states and union territories, where they are designated as Scheduled Tribe members.

One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerkat the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled someupdates onto an old resume and took it to his local copyshop. To his education and work history--a bachelor’sdegree in industrial engineering and technology, service inthe U.S. Marine Corps--he added a recent moonlightingjob as a handyman and a new "career objective." Tenminutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu manin a cavernous workplace began to type the Home Depotclerk’s words.

--

Their employer, a company named OfficeTiger, did the work not just of an American copy-shopchain but of seven of the twelve biggest banks on WallStreet--confidential labor carried out in unmarked roomswith film-covered windows, closed-circuit cameras, andelectronic security so unforgiving that as the typist finishedthe resume from Plano three bankers, accidentally lockedin a nearby room, were frantically pounding on a door.Office Tiger also performed work for a Big Four accountingagency, several white-shoe Northeastern law firms, aninsurance conglomerate, two large publishing concerns, aMadison Avenue advertising agency, global managementconsultancies, and other enterprises whose identities werenot divulged to workers of the resume-typing rank.The document specialists, all college graduates, earnedroughly a tenth of what they would have commanded forthis work in the U.S., and less, too, than they would havebeen paid in some call centers. But it was the possibilitythat one could rise up from a lowly position that had madeOffice Tiger one of the city’s status employers,

A clerkwho today did a bang-up job of formatting the work historyof a part-time handyman in Plano might be an adjunctinvestment banker by year’s end.

Capitalizing on their celebrated workethic, on a dozen practical-minded local universities, andon the ability of the elites to speak, in addition to Tamil, theclipped and elegant English of their colonizers,Chennaians developed the sort of forward-lookingeconomy that many of America’s post-manufacturing citiesstill struggle to achieve. "Better cheape" Western businessis Chennai’s new niche.

American uneasiness aboutoutsourcing--an issue in the current Presidentialcampaign--has turned Chennai into a secretive city, wherethe American back-office presence, everywhere felt, isalmost nowhere stated. Although American companieswith Picassos in their foyers and Corbusier chairs inreception still dispatch work to South Asia office buildingsfronted by beggars and spavined cattle, the companynames have been deleted from phone books, Web sites,and corporate entryways.

--

Thenew American attachment is not physical butconceptual--the lure of cheap, smart, pliable labor. AmongChennai’s janitors and security guards, as well as itsbankers, the need for discretion about that labor isunderstood. Even the ephemera of the United Statesoffshoring debate becomes front-page news here; many ofChennai’s young professionals now know the names JohnKerry, Lou Dobbs, Benedict Arnold, and Timothy Platt--thelatter the proprietor of a U. S.-based Web site calledyourjobisgoingtoindia.com, which is as closely followed inChennai as it is in Silicon Valley. Fascination with theAmerican controversy is more bemused than fearful.Chennaians in general believe that what they call"outsource hoopla" has already redounded to their favor,alerting a wider audience of executives and stockholdersto the benefits of wage arbitrage.Some American companies, such as Ford, have beenmanufacturing in the region for years, working to capture apiece of a potentially vast consumer market. But nownon-factory, professional employment is surging. Amongthe white-collar options available to Chennai’s collegegraduates are work for Verizon, Bank of America,Hewlett-Packard, Citibank, Visa, MasterCard, andElectronic Data Systems, a Plano-based tech companyfounded by the free-trade opponent Ross Perot, whichrecently announced a layoff of fifty-two hundred U.S.employees.

--

The Americanization of Chennai has been so swiftand--save inside the Park Hotel--so quiet that many of itscitizens do not yet grasp the change in their cultural andliteral landscape. An animation company makes cartoonsseen by American children on Saturday mornings.Radiologists read American MRIs, clerks adjudicatepatients’ insurance claims, and programmers automateMedicaid eligibility for an entire Midwestern state.Chartered accountants complete U.S. tax returns whileunderwriters certify U.S. mortgages. And within OfficeTiger’s pink building aspiring financiers analyze Americanfirms that are ripe for corporate takeover in a place theycall Wall Street East.One afternoon in late March,

One afternoon in late March, Office Tiger’s wirythirty-three-year-old co-C.E.O. stood at his desk,surrounded by luggage, receiving from Manhattan thenews that his firm had just landed Wall Street investmentbank No. 8--a half-a-million-dollar "starter" contract.

he was pleased but alsoharried. Executives of a Fortune 10 company would bedescending on the office the following day, but he haddecided he would have to miss the visit: officials of aFortune 5 company were awaiting him the same morningin Bangalore, a thirty-five-minute plane ride away.

--

Six years later, the Manhattan banks that Randy and Joeabandoned still have odes to "thrift" in their marble lobbies,but those banks also have rows of capacious, upholstered,untenanted cubicles. Almost twenty per cent of the jobs onWall Street have disappeared in the last three years.--

Office Tiger sometimes receivesfifteen hundred applicants a day, many of themaccompanied by parents who pray as their sons anddaughters take one test after another in the hope ofearning an interview with the beautiful, ruthlessly efficienthuman-resources executive in black pajamas, who doesher work in the reception area, behind a thin glass wall. AsJoe returned one more phone call--a cautious executivefrom Germany, which is experiencing an outsourcingbacklash, too--the narrow hallway outside the firm’s doorgrew crowded with the survivors of that testing--"Mercy, how do you think you did on the proofreadingtest?" the human-resources goddess, whose name isSudha ( SIB ), asked one such survivor, who was perched on theedge of her seat"I found it quite easy," responded Mercy, fatally. Her scorewas eighty-five. Joe and Randy seek workers likethemselves--the type haunted fifteen years later by thesingle question botched on the college aptitude test, andgame to perform even dull tasks with, to use the localterm, "full sincerity." A minute later, another applicant waswarming the chair.--Cost-saving improvements percolated up from theproduction level. Satisfied clients begat more clients--

"Harish? There are a hundred here like him," thehuman-resources goddess once observed in passingSince becoming a Tiger, he has made asingle significant outlay: to help his parents retire

A society with far more bright aspirants than promisingjobs inevitably becomes an over-credentialled one. Theinstitutions from which the young amass certificates andribbons are sometimes rigorous, sometimes fraudulent, but all have rousing names

For other Tigers, there wereother metaphors, but the sense of movement afterdecades of socioeconomic stasis was the same. Harish’sfriend Vidhya ( SIB ), who is twenty-five, heady with her rise fromreception to well-salaried senior management, bought herparents not just freedom from their jobs but a house

Harish, usually lighthearted, was sobered by the fact thatthe hopes of some trainees would be thwarted in hisclassroom. The ultimate goal of his teaching wassomething that Joe and Randy called "foolproofing." In acompany that offered judgment-dependent services,clients needed to believe that those judgments wereroutine, culturally uninflected, idiosyncrasy-free

the Rotary governor gleefullyreeled off the names of Global Adjustment’s prominentclients, but then his mood darkened slightly. Hollywood--"amultibillion-dollar industry, you know"--was not on the list.Reach out to American film moguls, he urged Ranjini andthe other attendees. "Tell them that they can film in India for ten per cent of what they’re currently spending."

of greater local interest wasthe progress of a Chennai-based hospital chain namedApollo. Apollo was aggressively recruiting ailingWesterners who were willing to outsource their hipreplacements or chemotherapy. Thanks in part toreasonably priced postsurgical sightseeing tours, thechain’s hospitals were now treating twenty thousandforeign patients a year.

In the outsourcingbusiness, a sudden surge in clients is called an"escalation"--a word that warns of seven-day workweeks.Office Tiger has been escalating for nearly two years now,the growth of its Wall Street research operations fuelled byregulatory reforms that came (along with criminal actionsand billion-dollar legal settlements) when United Statesbanks were caught manipulating their research in order toboost the profits of favored clients. Companies now sendjunior-analyst and research jobs to Office Tiger not justbecause it is cheaper but also because it is nine thousandmiles from Wall Street temptations.

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